Since I’m not a microbeast, until yesterday I had no idea what Liverpool FC’s anthem was. I only found out about it earlier this fall, starting a consumed 2023 only in mid-November when I read a novel with a title both inspired and strange- Today is the tomorrow you feared yesterday. The novel is signed by Radu Paraskivescu. It happened on the occasion of the 2023 reprint from the publishing house Humanitas.

To those who rush to reproach me for the delay in getting acquainted with one of Radu Paraskiescu’s best books (the first edition was published in 2012), I can answer that I am not at all in the situation of Mallarmé, who in the famous poem (Sea breezes), exclaims with undisguised sadness, but also skepticism, J‘ai lu tous les livres.

This is the name of an old Irish ballad Athenry Fields will be based on the anthem of the famous Irish football team. How it came to this, what the story of the respective ballad would be, he tells us in lavish detail in the three parts of Radu Paraskivescu’s book. But it does so with many liberties taken from real history. Sincere confessions from the title preface Request.

In reality, Athenry Fields he is not as old as the novel claims. Its origins are not entirely lost in the 19th century. Not a happy age for the Irish. The birth and existence of the song has nothing to do with the terrible prophecy and the related conclusion of the prophet Boyle, who until then was considered by the majority of citizens to be insane. This conclusion gave the title to the book. The first part of the book tells about the prophecy and how terrifyingly it was fulfilled. Under the name – another wonder!- Horta Mor. What does it mean in Romanian? Great famine. About this, about its cause – a terrible disease of potatoes – a vegetable on which the daily life of the Irish depended, in the image of an omniscient narrator, Rada Paraskivescu tells.

Athenry Fields it was actually composed by a certain Peter Mooney (alias Pete St. John} in the 1970s. However, in the novel we are told that Athenry Fields would become the anthem of the inmates at Macquarie Penitentiary, Tasmania. Having become at the end of a series of sufferings, humiliations and riots, the only sign of their independence from the terror imposed by the prison authorities. About independence and dignity.

Only here, too, does the novelist resort to what is called the technique of anachronism. We learn from the same Request that by the time the events described in Michael Flaherty’s diary are complete (hence the shift in narrative perspective), the prison no longer exists. It was closed in 1833, and the prisoners were transferred to Port Arthur. What then justifies the anachronism? Rada Paraskivescu explains everything to us. The sonority of the name. And even if it is not clear whether the escape attempt of someone named Michael Flaherty (the climax of the part called At the gates of hell}, sentenced to hard years in prison and hard labor for stealing to save his family from starvation, we also meet a certain Michael Flaherty in the third part of the novel. Title partAnifield Road Fields.

The new Flaherty seems to be a descendant of the first, being the one who established the canonical word form of the Liverpool football team anthem. His story is interwoven with the story of the antiquary Harry Tyndale, with the tragedy of the baby Timmy and a short sketch of the nurse Angela.

So, Radu Paraskivescu is right in this matter Request tells us about it in the novel Today is the tomorrow you feared yesterday, Athenry Fields “leaves its historical alveolus and settles in the world of fiction.” The quality of the storyteller Radu Paraskivescu prevails. Qualities visible regardless of the narrative instance to which the author delegates his functions. Rada Paraskivescu writes vividly, fluently, he is an excellent creator and manager of a phrase that, regardless of its size, perfectly preserves not only its beauty, but also its clarity. The phrase here also almost turns into a movie image, so Today is the tomorrow you feared yesterday has a consistent cinematic halo. In the names given to the sequence in the book, it appears that the graduate of the faculty of foreign languages ​​is Radu Paraskivescu. _read the entire article and comment on contributors.ro