Not being able to compete with Mallarmé, and therefore unable to exclaim, like him, that I have read all the books in the world, I hope I will be forgiven for saying that, until yesterday, I had not read a single book written by Cai de Vos. Bought the volume some time ago A city found in a box. An emotional chronicle of Bucharest (Editura Humanitas, Bucharest, 2022), I learned that its author, Gabriela Tabacu, a famous architect, is the same as the aforementioned Kaya de Vos. And reading the first chapter of the book, the chapter, what is it called Meetingthe thought involuntarily led me to the fashion of prefect French novels of the 18th century.

In the corresponding prefaces, the authors, still frightened and under the influence of very often harsh accusations against the Romanian genre, tried to assure the readers that, by reading them, they did not commit the slightest violation of the literary rules of the time, still indebted to the doctrine of classicism. I will recall that the eighteenth-century novel was mostly epistolary or diary-based, and in the prefaces in question, the novelists told us that they were publishing only something purely authentic. They accidentally found something in a secret drawer.

Here, in Gabriela Tabaku’s book, we are not talking about anything SECRETARY. But about the box of letters, unsent letters, some only simple drafts, some even unfinished and, as we are told, by no means apocryphal. A box found in the attic by the new owner of the old house. The box is entrusted to Gabriela Tabak. She read them, even identified the author, whom she decided to leave for now secretly he rewrote them, and it turned out, I dare say, a wonderful book. The book of Bucharest as it was between 1959 and 1984, or rather as it was perceived first by a child, then by an adolescent, and finally by a man who has reached maturity. Who does not feel huge and does not see the terrible, who knows how to talk about the past both critically and with nostalgia.

Found a city in a box it is the book of Bucharest and the book of a generation. Who also lived through the period of the capital’s boom, when the communist leaders made some ideological concessions and allowed a certain westernization of the city. However, the same generation also experienced the terrible times of systematization. About the systematic and criminal destruction of the beauties of the past. About the various crises experienced and swallowed by the Romanians when the desperate payment of the foreign debt began.

I would call that what Gabriela Tabak does well voice made. This is in Found a city in a box dynamics of style, adjustment to the evolution of age Confessor. Who at first pretends to be ignorant, who pretends not to really know what those who hear them mean, how it was before and what that would mean before, which later gives us many hints that he is counting on our complicity. The main rule of the autobiographical pact. By the way, the book was published in a series Memoirs/journal

The witness came to Bucharest from Oradea when she was still in kindergarten. At a time when the party, which was then called PMR, had not yet come up with an organization Falcons of the homeland. In 1959-1960, the world was still struggling in dire poverty, saving by weighing every penny. But he still walked on Sundays on Calea Victoriei, went to the cinema, to scale or at Home, places that today have been left in ruins by the capital’s new owners, because only the richest had TVs in their homes. Even in 1965, when Gheorghe Georgiou-Dezh, the initiator of the small hole and the deceptive spring, died, his funeral was watched on TV by those lucky enough to have such imported devices at home. Of course, everyone cried and suffered because there could be indifference interpreted (Gabriela Tabacu perfectly suggests the theme of omnipresent surveillance), the pioneers also suffered, including the confessor. Who once even became the president of the unit. The president, not the commander, the militarization of everything and everything should be brought by the successor of the “disappeared great”, who was promised to perpetuate his memory. But for communists, eternity has different dimensions, so Gheorghe Georgiou-Dezh was not an eternal hero either. His death brought about changes that would justify the worries of the confessor’s parents during mourning. Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro