George Arion and the Quest for a Romanian Crime Writing

Abstract

T he Romanian language is an island of Romance in a Slavic ocean, adjacent to another linguistic island, Hungary. Once roughly the Roman province of Dacia, the area retained the Latin the Romans brought with their conquest in the second century ad. Successive invasions , migrations, and conquests, such as those by the Huns, the Slavs, the Magyars, and the Turks, have influenced the language and contributed vocabulary, but the underlying nature of the language stubbornly persisted. For example, of all the Romance languages, Romanian is the only one to retain the noun declensions of Latin, leading Romanians to proudly state that their language is the descendant of Latin that most resembles Latin. A reader of modern French or Spanish has little trouble getting the general drift of Romanian newspaper articles once she gets used to the spelling practices, even though she may hit a snag on some of the adopted Slavic words. George Arion Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis With the publication of Attack in the Library, Arion pulled off one of the nerviest and most influential publications in a totalitarian context. and the Quest for a Romanian Crime Writing November–December 2014 • 9 10 worldliteraturetoday.org There are 23 to 25 million native speakers of the language, which is about one-third the number of French speakers, less than half the number of Turkish speakers, and roughly the same number as Nigerian Igbo speakers . Having the misfortune of a geography in the pathway of conquering tribes and massive migrations, the area that is now Romania has been sliced dozens of ways and served up to many a kingdom and empire, interfering with its literary and cultural development. It wasn’t until 1877 that Romania became an independent state under an imported German king, Carol I. Despite the example of his queen, who was an untiring author of plays, poems, and novels in several languages under the pseudonym Carmen Sylva, the literary culture remained limited. Until after World War II, illiteracy was common in Romania, with sometimes half the population considered unable to read and write. Although illiteracy plummeted in the Communist era (and was declared nonexistent in the 1950s), the restrictions upon literary activity were formidable. Ordinary crime writing wasn’t allowed because crime did not exist in the workers’ paradise. The CIA was behind all crime. I was told in a recent visit to Romania that in the 1950s, police were ordered to write crime stories to satisfy the hunger for them, but, Joseph Wambaugh to the contrary, policemen have no particular writing skills, and the effort was a disaster. After two decades of unconscionable oppression, Romania revolted and Ceauşescu faced a firing squad. The sense of creative freedom and the desire to participate in the greater global culture was powerful. Writers had built up a large backlog of things they wanted to say. They saw a hunger for entertaining crime novels in Romania, and many of them saw crime writing as a means to express important truths about society, both to their own nation and to the world. They particularly drew inspiration from the so-called “Nordic crime wave,” in which Scandinavian crime writers were popular and influential in non-Scandinavian nations. Despite the fact that reviewers did not take crime writing seriously—in fact, they would not even review crime writing—several hearty writers persisted. The dean of Romanian crime writers is George Arion, whose 1983 novel Atac în bibliotecă (Eng. Attack in the Library, 2011) has been said to be the reason that there are any contemporary Romanian crime novels. A critic , journalist, librettist, and screenwriter , Arion began as a poet in the 1960s, publishing a verse collection in 1966. At that point, the Ceauşescu regime was considered one of the most liberal in the Soviet bloc, along with Tito’s in Yugoslavia. However, as the 1970s progressed and Ceauşescu solidified his power, his admiration for the Cultural Revolution in China caused him to impose one of the most rigid regimes in the world, one even the Soviets thought extreme. “Those years were very hard,” one writer said to me this summer, looking at the pavement as if a mural of unhappiness...