My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest
“A great writer in perfect mastery of his gifts.” LE MONDE
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 delicious corruptions.
“The secret of Goma’s style: the marriage of irony, violence and reverence for life. The ‘other Europe’ is there in its entirely, seen through the eyes of the child in the village, seen in the village people, heroes and victims who make up this story. What a tour de force to create out of tragedy such a grand comic design.” LE FIGARO, Paris
“Thanks to Goma, Basarabia becomes as alive and real as the Galicia of Joseph Roth’s writings and the Vitebsk that Marc Chagall painted to the end of his days, those bouquets, violins, and goats floating far above the rooftops of our imagination.” L’EXPRESS, Paris
“The novel’s fragmented structure, though initially confusing, beautifully conveys the jumbled feelings of a captive people whose stubborn misunderstanding of Stalinist collectivization makes them unsubduable.”
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, USA
Cover image by Marc Chagall.