The great Romanian writer’s tenth novel - his only work in English - is a Proustian feast of memory and experience centering on young Paul and his family, who live through World War II in circumstances sadly familiar today, where a remote village is swept up in fighting between rival armies, one of them … Russian. The boy’s father, a fiercely idealistic teacher but a bungling family man, is deported to Siberia, leaving Mother to take charge of the school, bury the dead of all sides, and try to protect her little orphan from the horrors of life as well as from its delightfully childish erotic adventures. Fast forward to the postwar debates between the grownup son and his father, in Angela Clark’s superb, flowing translation: The teacher in Father… As opposed to the other conquerors and occupying forces, the Russian has a great big heart, as big as a cartwheel. A Russian isn’t Russian unless, before he sticks the knife in your back, he kisses you on the cheek, explains to you why he, poor soul, has been forced, cursed and condemned to do it… and there you go, in the twinkling of an eye. But you can be sure he will be the one to suffer the torments of hell. God chose him for this kind of work: to help you, to liberate you, to teach you, to give you the shirt off his back today, because that shirt was yours anyway, yesterday…
I think you’re exaggerating, I said. Listen, I hope from the very bottom of my heart that I am exaggerating… from My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest