Cella Serghi, "Pînza de păianjen"

 – e-book

Perioada relecturii: 6 – 23 februarie 2015

Votul meu:

Nu ştiu de ce am simţit nevoia să recitesc romanul Cellei Serghi, după mai bine de 20 de ani. Poate pentru că aminteşte de el Mihail Sebastian în Jurnalul său, Jurnal care mi-a trezit nostalgia lecturilor din liceu, cînd priveam cu atîta admiraţie spre literatura noastră interbelică.

Din păcate, trecerea timpului nu mi-a schimbat impresia: acum ca şi atunci, nu pot vedea în Cella Serghi decît o autoare pasabilă, de vacanţă, fără vreo pretenţie reală la un loc alături de monştrii noştri sacri a căror contemporană a fost. Scriitura sa rămîne pentru mine în categoria chick-lit, prin miza pe sentimentalism şi melodramă, amestecate (ceea ce o salvează, oarecum) cu descrieri de bună forţă evocativă.

Yves Beauchemin, "Les émois d’un marchand de café"

 – Québec Amérique 1999, ISBN 978-2-8903-7993-0

Lu du 6 au 19 février 2015

Mon vote : 

Ma première rencontre avec un auteur québécois de langue française s’est révélée tout à fait charmante. Dans un style simple et robuste et préférant un néo-réalisme qui se moque éperdument de toutes les trouvailles postmodernistes de la fin du vingtième siècle, Yves Beauchemin développe dans Les émois d’un marchand de café un thème aux inépuisables ressources tragi-comiques : le bien qui peut faire du mal.

Wayne C. Booth, "Retorica romanului"

Prefață de Ștefan Stoenescu – Univers, București 1976

Perioada relecturii: 20 decembrie 2014 – 8 februarie 2015

Votul meu:

Wayne C. Booth este poate cel mai cunoscut dintre membrii Școlii de la Chicago, care prin anii ’60, se opuneau grupării Noua critică și a fermei convingeri a acesteia că opera literară este un obiect estetic autosuficient și autoreferențial, a cărei valoare trebuie căutată mai ales în limbaj și structură și al cărei autor poate fi ignorat. Pentru criticii neo-aristotelieni de la Chicago însă, stilul era doar un aspect, un material de construcție de importanță secundară în ansamblul operei.

Considerată cea mai importantă operă de critică literară după Anatomia criticii (1957) a lui Northrop Frye, Retorica romanului (și vorbesc aici despre ediția din 1961, căci din păcate nu am citit-o încă pe aceea revizuită trei decenii mai tîrziu) repune în discuție raportul autor-narator-cititor pornind de la trei afirmații: nu poți vorbi despre un text în afara autorului său; orice narațiune este o formă de retorică; orice operă de valoare își educă propriul cititor.

Ian McEwan, "Solar"

 – Vintage Canada Edition 2011 ISBN 978-0-307-39925-0

Read from January 23^rd to February 4^th 2015

My rating :

Should I feel ashamed? According to some critics of McEwan’s Solar I should, since its hero, Michael Beard, is a despicable character, a philanderer, a plagiarist, an egocentric and a criminal liar… whom I totally liked. Moreover, it is a long time since I have been so immersed in a reading to forget everything around me – last week I almost missed the metro stop on my way to university, so much I was enjoying this crazy, crazy book, which rose conflicting reactions among its readers.

One of the most acerbic reviews was written immediately after its apparition in 2010 by Jason Cowley in The Guardian (here it is). The journalist pointed out mercilessly many of what he considered the minuses of the novel, from the one-dimensional character to the trodden subject, from the sometimes nonsensical comedy to the lack of other perspectives, ending with a graphic image of the book as an empty room in which only the groan-like confession “of a fat, selfish man in late middle age eating himself” can be heard.

However seductive this metaphor of a novel speaking like an echoic chamber, I beg to differ. Not against the observations per se, they are true enough, but against the implication they are flaws.

Paul Celan, "Selected Poems"

 – e-book

Read from December 10^th to 16^th 2013

My rating:

“He speaks truly who speaks the shade”

I was eighteen and obsessed with this verse. I can’t remember where I found it, maybe I had read it in a book, maybe someone had given it to me (we used to collect quotes then). I knew it was Paul Celan’s, but I did not know Paul Celan. I did not even know how to pronounce his name – it sounded French to me, but I had a vague suspicion it could be Romanian. And of course, living in a communist Romania I couldn’t possible make a genuine research and soon I forgot about him or abandoned him for I had just discovered Dostoyevsky, my greatest obsession of all.

But, in some corner of my mind, Paul Celan always lingered and thirty years after I can at last put a title and a poem and a book around that strangely beautiful verse. I’ve also learned I was both right and wrong in my assumptions: Celan, an anagram of his real name, Anczel, was used as a pseudonym while publishing in a Romanian periodical, but otherwise his links with Romania were complicated, as were those of all our writers in exile (Cioran’s, Ionesco’s, Eliade’s, etc.) and in his case rather weak – it is hard to find a veritable influence of Romanian literature in his work, not at the same extent as French and German influence even though the poems he published at Bucharest immediately after WWII were in the Surrealist spirit still effervescent in Romania of that time. Anyway, his penname would eventually be pronounced in a French manner, since he lived in Paris until his death.