It is hard to evaluate the amount of trauma one may get while growing up in a dictatorship. Of how getting used to live with fear as the only way of life perverts your self-awareness and trust in the others. How vicious are the lies for a normal mental and moral development. I want to stop now the amount of thoughts overwhelming me when thinking about this topic. With more books based in communist Romania, I may have the chance to talk about it on other occasions.
I better talk more about Astronaut!, the second novel by Oana Aristide instead. Lia is a 8-year old curious girl who loves colours. She notices how colours, including colouring pencils, are disappearing from her world. She is careless with what she talks with people, creating a lot of troubles for her parents.
It is late 1980s, when the scarcity and repression of the Romanian dictatorship was doubled by a paranoid panic of the repression apparatchiks. Who are not tasked with a special mission: finding the criminal(s) killing various Securitate - communist ´intelligence´ apparatus - informers. Or maybe was rather a bear, or many of them at a killing spree?
Constantin, a policeman who loves stories - to write and read to his son - seems to be apparently untainted by the last jump of patriotic wave, observing the corruption of his co-workers and the kafkaesque bear-hunting. Lia and Constantin may be an unlikely anti-hero characters match, but in a world where people are running from one cue to another unable to figure out what is delivered that time, normality shall be re-defined.
Aristide´s take on the storyline and characters is full of empathic humour, successfully defying the need to lecture or complain. For a long time I felt that the Romanian dictatorship is rarely the pretexte of stories written in English while the Romanian writers are rather focused on the post-communist trauma. Astronaut! showed me that this shift is changing and cannot wait to read and review more such novels.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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