People. Women and men. Children. Places. Time.
I tried to find a common denominator for the stories presented in this anthology, a coordinator of ideas who left his mark on all the stories. Different in style, in number of pages, they talk about various places and events in everyday life, from childhood, real or sublimated events, about small cafes where the beginning or end of love stories is consumed, about the location of an office to name just a few of these real places. All these places and events give reality the chance to become a dream.
Where is the dream home?
The characters live, in a real way, in real places, whether it's the desert on the border of Saudi Arabia, from the story "Steps on the sand" by Mariana Al ‑ Saleh, or the small rented apartment of Augustine, from prose, a little longer, over 60 pages, "My Pelican, Raoul" written by Loana Ciobanu.
The farm, which the nameless female character from the first story wants to visit, is nothing more than a dream, a place with "fertile land" in the middle of the desert. The woman, accompanied by a man, together with her little girl, Sara, makes a journey, back and forth through the desert to go to the farm, a place that exists only in her dreams. Tamed, reality builds itself beyond itself, and beyond itself can be called otherwise. Dreaming, like the "morgana girl" of dessert, comes and goes, but she leaves footsteps on the sand.
The same happens with the pelican Raoul, Augustine's comrade, the ideal partner of loneliness. Augustine adopts an illusion, a pelican, coming from nowhere, knocking on her door, looking for shelter, after she had passed through everyone. Why does Augustina, who had gone through a few love stories, make this gesture? Why does he share his loneliness, reality and destiny with a pelican? Adopting an illusion of happiness is part of the domestic means of taming an increasingly captivating reality in a "gossip-filled" town. It is a last gesture of Augustine's defense against her own memories, against the small anniversaries at work, against the summer holidays, when you fall in love with the wrong person. And her gesture of adopting a pelican succeeds! Opening the door and letting him into her small rented apartment, she opens the door to an unconfessed dream.
His desire to meet Little Red Riding Hood, from Bogdana Baciu's prose "Story with wolves", with an obvious reference to the old fairy tale, creates premises for a fluidity of the characters. A young reporter, who goes to see Mrs. Noir for an interview, stops at an inn, where a teenager, as a "little cook at the forest inn", overturns the old fairy tale. Her headdress, red from head to toe, which also attracts her name, is illusory. The next day, passing by the forest inn again, Little Red Riding Hood is no longer to be found.
Where is the dream location?
A resident of surgery, from prose of the same title by Nora Ramniceau, would perhaps give a very accurate answer. But it is not enough.
Tudor Cristian Gongu dreams of an ideal book launch. "It is said that desire is stronger than the object of desire," he says in the story in this anthology. What really happened at the bookstore is subordinated to this desire for the ideal.
The social prose from "Tanti Teodoru", with accents difficult to comment on during this period, is brought by Anida Lasto. "The reality is that we abandoned our parents and grandparents, constrained by the fines of a system in which we had put all our hopes ...", says doctor Nicolae Popescu, who "refuses", on behalf of the system, to hospitalize an old woman. It didn't matter what love the old lady had for his former piano teacher.
It hurts? Yes, it hurts! The reality is, most of the time, harsh!
The fight with real time in "Photos", prose, only a few pages, written by Lilioara Macovei, or "seasonal memories" of the male character in "Alone, with a suitcase made" by Ruxandra ‑ Magdalena Manea, involves multiple duplications, breaks and time, personality disintegration, temporal escapes.
Realities about burial rituals or pre-Christian customs, exorcisms, make Maria Nitu's prose, entitled "Born with tichie", a short documentary monograph of a village in southern Romania. I think it's the only text without a niche for breathing, meaning dreaming. The description of horror, in the form of exorcism, requires special treatment. Only the priest can tame such a reality.
"Desaga de visuri" from the biography of the author Andreea Pitulescu is downloaded in her prose "A true story about who I am not" and the bathroom mirror captures all the close-ups and voices that complement each other.
What lies behind each story?
Untold stories, white areas of memory, white areas of writing, revelations suspended in time, flashes like a bird's beak that breaks the narrative texture, making room for other customs, for other events.
Clelia Ifrim