The amazing adventures of Anton Retegan and his file

Author: Gheorghe Săsărman

Publisher: Nemira, Bucharest, 2011, 335 p.

In the fall of 2011*, Nemira Publishing House printed Nemaipomenitele aventuri ale lui Anton Retegan și ale dossierarului său. A novel by Gheorghe Săsărman - it says on the cover. It's a beautifully made book, you take it with pleasure in your hand, it has a (very slightly) elongated format, page margins of classic proportions, more generous than those we are used to in newer books, well-chosen lettering and clear printing on yellowish paper. From the first contact, a table of contents on a few pages leads to the book's thick titles of parts and chapters. Sarcastically summarized - the reader will soon find out.

The action takes place in Romania, in the second half of the twentieth century, under the last totalitarian leader, in places as different as possible, some secret, some exposed, many of them anodyne. It is a period when a social pathology is taking hold, managed by an increasingly limited and aggressive power group. The faithful instrument of this pathology - the Security Service and the documents produced in its apparatus, the security file, in this case - become, as the title suggests, characters who accompany the hero's only apparently picaresque adventures.

The story goes something like this: Anton Retegan, a young man with a healthy social background and an impressive school record, comes from Transylvania to Bucharest to study architecture. After graduating with a degree, he gives up his future as a planner for a career as a journalist at the leading newspaper of the time, takes his vocation as a (science fiction) prose writer seriously and takes an esteemed doctorate in architectural theory. At the gazette, he works as a science and current affairs reporter-chronicler-critic, publishes Romanian fiction with international success, marries for the first time, divorces, falls in love, and on the second attempt builds a family (which will also prove to be remarkably lively) with his wife Sara and two children.

In the labyrinth of multilaterally developed socialism, he would have some amazing adventures. Having set out on the road in the midst of a post-Stalinist thaw, confident in the bright future of humanity proposed by the egalitarian utopia reformed as socialism with a human face, Anton collides with the real system, indulges in pioneering impulses, finds himself in the wake of events, encounters, conflicts, dangers, attractions and choices, and fatally breaks away from the project of historical engineering in which he had once believed. A project failed, before his eyes, in absurdity, repression and structural violence. It is a definitive rupture, which will lead him and Sara to resort to the harshest solution: exile.

The final episode of The Adventures takes place in a railroad car, somewhere on Romania's western border. After checking the documents and inspecting the wrecked suitcases under the sphinx-like gaze of a female customs officer, the train starts moving unbearably slowly. The Reteganis set off on a tourist trip that they know will become a permanent exile. Anton and Sara, mature and grown up, settle permanently in Germany to start a new existence. Thus ends the adventures recounted in the novel.

Gheorghe Săsărman has transferred many details, events and circumstances from his own biography into this book. The plethora of real references, whether coded or direct, have prompted those who have published chronicles, as well as old friends, to wonder where in the systematics of literary genres this text should be placed. Autofiction - as one commentator puts it?

A memoir that is faithful to a personal story, taking care not to infringe on the right to the image of many living protagonists, with roles that are not always commendable, present under vaguely 'blurred' names? A romanticized autobiography - in a register oscillating between the sentimental-emotional and the corrosive-pamphlet-like? An anti-Bildungsroman, which does not follow the building of an experience of exemplary convictions and certainties, but the opposite path, of demolition, disillusion, disillusionment, dis-vision, dis-witching, of a disarming that cannot avoid definitive renunciations and ruptures?

Unlike many other books of memoirs about the "golden age" written according to the established protocol of the chronological sequence, this essentially autobiographical text is also a novel in the proper sense of the term, with varied characters and situations, a plot of the graph type with multiple knots and links, with returns in time, reminiscences, digressions. All this is under the sign of a narrative construction that is - deliberately - reminiscent of Picard novels: from the title of the book (we are dealing with Anton's adventures and his security file) to the titles of the parts and chapters - all long, ramified, a kind of ironic compendium that complicates and, possibly, explains once more the serious subject matter of the story.

The adventures are set against a backdrop (geographical, social, cultural) that is both real and not entirely real. The details of this background, whether they be people, events, names of institutions, places or towns, are rephrased by the writer using a relatively transparent code. The reference can be guessed easily enough by those who lived through the period or knew the author. The "Scânteia" newspaper becomes "Amnarul", the art weekly for which Anton writes - "Cultura nouă" ("Contemporanul"?), Suzana Gâdea (an influential and long-lived political figure at the top of the cultural hierarchy of the time) crosses the stage of Anton's adventures as comrade Florica Călău, and the Committee for Socialist Culture and Education (headed for a while by Suzana G.) is called the Council of Multilateral Socialist Culture. Even if the Bucharest or Cluj of Anton's youth appear under their real names, the city where the Reteganii will settle in internal self-exile is called Oredava, a toponymic fiction harking back to the not sufficiently brief epidemic when lost historical names were reinstated. The particle Napoca was glued to the name of Cluj, and Drobeta to Turnu Severin in the 1970s, in a moment of conjunctural enthusiasm for the ancient past.

Otherwise, a sensitive reader interested in daily life and the mores of certain expressively typified social environments (family, neighbors, journalists from the Casa Scânteii, IPJ - Design Institute, multi-ethnic courtyards, high school life in the cities of Transylvania) or the ideological coloratura of the period will discover a remarkable "rendu". The reader has much to learn about the wooden languages (ideological, bureaucratic), clichés, nicknames and ritual formulations of the time (the sun of victorious socialism, the bright future of mankind, the defector in cahoots with world imperialism, the resolution of antagonistic contradictions, the superficial understanding of dialectical materialism, "organs", the "organ", the lizard, the sneakers, the Petreuș brothers or takamuri, "choosing freedom" - all of them meaningless today). The ironic and sad distance with which not only the horror, but also the patent imbecility, stupidity or ignorance of the repressive system - as well as its arrogant omnipresence - are treated makes Gheorghe Săsărman's prose as effective as the explicit vehement demasculinizing of other writings in the same thematic class.

In addition to the vocabulary of the time, Gheorghe Săsărman used verbatim transcripts of administrative correspondence, denunciations, job "characterizations" and resolutions from his security file. And the memo he addresses to the supreme ruler, with that good faith that accompanies, in the novel, Anton's detachment from his over-hasty belief in the potential for egalitarian reform of all mankind, is exemplary of many real texts in which petitioners addressed "higher leadership", alleging injustice and suffering and expecting redress and justice.

Gheorghe Săsărman (b. 1941) is a native of the Ardean region of Transylvania living in Bucharest and then in Germany, a theoretical architect by training, a computer scientist by circumstance and a prose writer by vocation, which he took up early on. He made his debut in fiction in 1969, as a student, with the book The Oracle, followed by Squaring the Circle (1975), Himera (1979), 2000 (1982) to name but a few. Over the last 20 years, reprints have appeared in the country, some of which have been reprinted, some of which have added the censored fragments to previous editions, but also new works(North against South, in 2001, or Vedenii, in 2007). His prose - much of it science fiction - has been printed in volumes and anthologies in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Japan and Hungary.

One more thing should be said here. Gheorghe Săsărman has a common past with the magazine "Arhitectura". In the novel of Anton Retegan's adventures, the magazine is called "Vitruvius" and has an episodic role, much paler than in the author's real life. Gheorghe Săsărman wrote criticism in the magazine at a time when a new editorial team, with Mircea Lupu and Alexandru Sandu at the helm, both at the beginning of their careers, had achieved an unexpectedly energetic reform. The solemn realist-socialist format of the magazine "Arhitectura RPR", administered by a board made up of the popes of the profession in the 1950s and 60s, with its white cover and title in an antique-Renaissance font, disappears. The magazine was transformed: an almost square page, a smaller and manageable volume, a varnished cover with "three-color polychrome" author's graphics, thematic fascicles on colored paper, an imaginative rubric, alliances with the visual arts, with the then nascent design and new technologies in construction. The magazine reserves an important place for the author's opinions, with contributions from columnists who write for each issue of the magazine , such as The Ideas Movement, The Dial, The Issue Interview, Design-Art and Our Forebears. Read now, decades later, Gheorghe Săsărman's texts for his (his?) Agora column add to the portrait he paints of himself in Nemaipomenitele aventuri... the necessary touches to understand the path that led him to intellectual and writing autonomy, by breaking away from clichés and overly explicit links with the official themes of the time.

The thorny question of his collaboration with the political police is not avoided. In exchange for information notes - it is suggested to Anton at one point - his biographical omissions (a brother in America, relatives in the FRG because of whom he had been expelled from the press and had lost his status in the intellectual world) could be erased from his cadre file. As a result, Anton could return to journalism, receive a passport and exit visa, travel, write and publish worldwide without hindrance, and even with some support.

The theme of collaboration accompanies many stories about "multilateral socialism" - be they fictional, historical or memoir. It is a dark theme, accompanied by accounts of blackmail, threats, cowardice, betrayed trust. Anton is also confronted with the offer of a pact with the devil. After analyzing the option of "leading them by the nose" and "tricking" the "organs" with innocent reports, which would do no harm to anyone when the time comes to denounce them, Anton refuses to cooperate, convinced that once the pact with the political police has been concluded, it can never be denounced and the price to pay will be irrecoverable for the rest of his life, as a fellow security officer warns him, in a crisis of sincerity. Retegan will say NO and choose exile.

Gheorghe Săsărman has written the novel of a frustrated, fragmented experience (as an architect), haunted by frustrations and the injustices of a repressive and often absurd world. Neither the author nor his hero seem willing to feel sorry for themselves, to invoke historical fatality and to look for the culprits for their own inconsistencies or opportunism only outside. Both the one and the other embark on a lucid journey, aided by analytic instinct and humor, a polemical spirit sensitive to paradox and surreal situations, and a remarkably sharp critical disposition, put to work both when it comes to the social and historical landscape and, all the more precious, when it comes to one's own existence and experience.

Not only a historically accurate documentary, not only an original and well-written narrative: we have in the story of Anton Retegan's amazing adventures told by Gheorghe Săsărman - a text of the most convincing frankness, lucidity and intellectual consistency.

*The article was sent to the editorial staff of "Arhitectura" magazine in 2012.