I am happy to welcome back Christopher Schaeffer of Ghost Or Balloon back for another Lost Books Month guest post. The prose-poetic novel he reviews today, Zenobia, currently lives in a half-light of in print status. It appears available on many major websites but either fails to ship or is listed as clearance.
I have included a link to Northwestern's bookshop, which might be the best way to obtain a copy.
I will post two books of my own next week, probably on Tuesday and Wednesday.
By the way, Christopher, kudos on using the word bajillion.
Gellu Naum's Zenobia reviewed by Christopher Schaeffer
Zenobia by Gelly Naum. Translated by Sasha Vlad and James Brook. Fiction. Northwestern University Press. Trade paperback. ISBN: 0810112558. 192 pps. $18.
In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles famous introduces himself to the good doctor as “Ein Teil von jener Kraft/ Die stets das Bose will, und stets das Gute schafft”—that is, to put a gloss on it, a part of the universal force that always causes good by evil. It’s an aptly inclusive little aphorism for that polymath work, and all too easy to apply to the broader world of letters, where necessity is often an appallingly deadbeat mother to invention. Imagine a perfect world turning out a Dostoyevsky or a Kafka; Berryman or Lowell without crippling mental demons to wrestle with; Rousseau without a stifling order to rail against; Dante without a bajillion miscellaneous pricks of various degrees to occupy his Hell. Even setting aside the boring truism of the artist as melancholy and passionately afflicted creature, its one of the curious paradoxes of literature that the most intensely humanizing and luminous works come from the most chilling conditions, so that, for example, its difficult to put down Coleridge without being tempted to think “well thank God for opium addiction and bipolar disorder.”
That’s the position I found myself in after finishing Gellu Naum’s Zenobia, a bizarre literary time-capsule and a gorgeous work of poetic prose. Naum, a founding figure in the Bucharest Surrealist circle of the 1940’s, soon found his incredible knack for febrile dreaminess and abstract tension nipped in the bud by the post-war mandate for more, more, more Socialist Realism. For the next 20 odd years of Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime, he cranked out children’s books and translations, secretly persisting with his Surrealist poetry but not risking publication.
What this means for us, fortunate readers, is that Zenobia has the mysterious flavor of something from another time, something which spent decades pacing its cell and fermenting while outside literature proceeded away from the touchstones of surrealism. Zenobia is a model surrealist anti-novel, sure, but it’s more than that—it contains all of the frustrations and melancholy and wistfulness of an art pent up for too long. It has the dreamy aesthetic meandering of Breton’s Mad Love and the emotional immediacy of Herta Muller, a mix resulting in a surrealism more plastic than truly dream-like, more febrile than narcotic. The closest thing I can think of by way of comparison is Boris Vian, but Naum’s stakes are higher, his tragedies more deeply felt.
Zenobia is, roughly, a love story, between the poet Gellu Naum and the silent, pliant woman he decides to dub Zenobia. It slouches wearily between Romania’s under-developed marsh regions to a vast and anonymous Bucharest populated by ghosts and the ghostly living. It is, well, pretty goddamn bleak.
This persistent overcast mood, and the intensity of the narrator’s commitment to it, is the largest stylistic difference between Naum and Vian. Both writers craft worlds of dream-like anomie, where agency flutters between people, ideologies, and inanimate objects like a fickle metaphysical moth, where romantic love is more epistemological than erotic, and where physics seem to obey poetic rather than natural laws. However, where Vian isn’t afraid to have a little fun with this situation—his Les Ecumes des Jours occasionally hits Tom & Jerry-esque levels of manic slapstick—Naum for the most part remains all business. His commitment to a mood is deeply serious, deeply thoughtful. It’s the attitude of a writer whose right to occupy a fictional universe of dream-logic and fantasy was hard-fought and traumatizing. His approach to fantasy is expressed succinctly in Zenobia’s titular character:
For Zenobia there is nothing unimportant or common: in this respect she is like a magnifying glass in which the world changes size, naturally and by itself, in slow patterns, and doesn't strive to exist; through her, eclipses disappear in an all-absorbing clarity.
It can be a difficult novel to approach. After tracking down a 15-year old copy from Northwestern University’s “Writings From an Unbound Europe” line, it took several tentative attempts to break through the initial scenes of the book. These, which depict the narrator wandering starving in the wilderness for unspecified reasons, are among the most gratuitously squalid of the novel, but also include some of Naum’s lyrical peaks:
“Please review, while I, crouched in front of that void that I called ‘the window,’ lay in wait for the coming of spring; little by little, the snows melted, a deep serenity filled my heart when, as the snow diminished, the wet black earth appeared; puddles were left as evidence down through the valley; as far as the eye could see, a kind of undecided presentiment of grass started to cover the field with its green color, and so on; on the other side of the dam the reeds seemed to awaken and millions of dazed insects, invisible until yesterday, started their circling again, in the sunlight, which grew warmer with every passing day; from time to time I went out in front of the door to howl; I would howl two or three times, look over the field (lest somebody should hear me), then go back inside; one day I plucked new grass, vigorous and fresh, from the dam, and I returned with my boot soles caked in cold, sticky mud.”
As the novel proceeds from the wilds into the city, Naum’s formal experimentation grows bolder. Chapters break down into brief, numbered sections, interspersed with bizarre journalistic non-sequitors:
“In Montemosola the annual competition for the most beautiful mustache was won by the Greek, Nicolas Stassinos, the owner of a 24-inch mustache.”
In the city, Naum’s sentences grow increasingly tangled and expansive, the self-referential qualities glimpsed in the passage above exert more and more weight on the narrative, language is subverted and undercut, until the linguistic burden of modernism drives his characters back into the natural world. In terms of plot, that about covers it. However, the novel is sprinkled with elements that hint temptingly at a cohesive story, leads that expire in bathos or dread, leaving the narrator as baffled as the reader.
The translation by James Brook and Sasha Vlad (the only English translation, as far as I know) is fairly utilitarian while capturing the half-weary, half-electrified tone of Naum’s narrator. The contrast between the often flat, prosaic tone and the wild overgrowth of each individual sentence is effectively rendered, although I got the impression that they grew into the novel’s unique demands as they progressed—it becomes progressively smoother and more compelling as it goes.
Zenobia is not necessarily an easy novel to love, and at times seems openly hostile to the reader. Naum is anything but a household name in the U.S., and even among fans of Eastern European literature or surrealism he’s relatively obscure. However, Zenobia exerts a strange grip on those who’ve read it, almost on a par with the zealous fans of Raymond Queneau or Flann O’Brien.
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