Out of the books chosen for the Deutscher Buchpreis this year, Die Nicht Sterben - Those not dying - by the Romanian-born, Swiss-based author Dana Grigorcea was a promise for me. Written in German it had the potential - according to various reviews I´ve read - to bring interesting topics made in Romania to a German audience, in a literary way. As it promised a serious drop of contemporaneity, I was more than happy to start reading it.
But the reading haven´t been smoothly, although I did my best to finish it and the writing captivated me until the very end.
Good parts: It is well written and there is a story built carefully and with attention to literary details. A young painter is returning to B., a village in Transylvania and is confronted with the new realities of a country in transition. An easy topic that can be used in so many creative way. However, Transylvania, a beautiful part of Romania, with a beautiful nature and architecture, and a multi-cultural environment and nice recipes and beautiful flowers and many many more is very well known in the German-speaking realm, and not only for the ´Dracula´, a purely fictional character, often and wrongly associated with a Romanian prince, Vlad the Impaler who got the name for a serious reason. Portrayed in the chronicles of the time as intransigent with his enemies, going so far as impaling his enemies at stakes in the ground (hence the name).
In addition to the story of the Impaler, there is not only a castle, supposedly hunted (probably by those who stole the furniture many years ago and brought it to their modest living rooms) which is used for various Halloween-related events, but there were also some local Romanian post-comunist politicians who rhetorically made appeal to the Vlad for a symbolic support in ´cleaning´ the country from ´enemies´ (a long and flexible list that I prefer not to detail right now). Through an alchemical literary process, there are ghosts added to the story - les revenants/moroi - the dead people who are coming back from the grave for different reasons.
Die nicht sterben plays - although in a decent, educated way - this game of spookiness. The more the card was played, the more distant from the story I become. Until I got completely lost.
This happened a couple of weeks distance after I´ve read another book by a Romanian author, writing in French, set this time in the Eastern part of the country, in Moldova, where ghosts were plenty and people were coming out of graves either by themselves or as someone digged into their grave.
Is this what the European publishers are looking for? Ghosts stories from Romania with vampires and bats and, obviously, Vlad the Impaler (who reigned 5 centuries ago, just sayin´)?
It reminded me as a couple of years after the fall of communism, movies and books in the original Romanian language were overwhelmed by political references, with characters cursing with a sensual pleasure, no matter what.
It was like people forgot to fall in and out of love, make friends or take their children to school. According to this description, everyone was entangled in political disputes in a vocabulary reduced to heavy curses - indeed, Romanian curses are an example of creative vodoo thinking but believe me, not everyone use it as the main vocabulary.
Now, it looks like the setting of a Walking Dead scenery.
The world from Die nicht sterben is a world between worlds and the burlesque and grotesque do well to the fiction, but at least Transylvania that I used to know and love is vampire-free and dead people do not came back haunting from the cemeteries.
All being said, I am working hard to prepare in the next days more reviews of the books selected for the longer list of Deutsche Bucherpreis. Feeling like an owl those days but far from being a ghost. And I promise to not give up until will find some great Romanian contemporary authors as well...
Rating: 2.5 stars
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