Skip to main content

Incognito

'Incognito' is an appropriate title for a novel (at least in the English speaking world) barely anyone has heard of, let alone read! It is by the Romanian author, Petru Dumitru, who defected from Romania in the 1960s, settling first in Germany and finally in France, where he died in 2002.

I read it first at university having seen it quoted in Bishop John Robinson's 'An Exploration into God' - a sequel (if theological texts can be described this way) to his famous (or notorious) 60s tract, 'Honest to God'!

It struck me then, and remembering it now, as one of the most significant (and accomplished) novels of the last century. It tracks the life of a privileged family in pre-World War II Romania through the war and out the other side into a new Communist world.

On its surface, it is an exemplary novel of social realism that skewers the true reality of the emergent 'Socialist' society where the cynical and the manipulative have out manoeuvred the idealistic believers (think Stalin versus Trotsky - though in Trotsky's case idealism was no inoculation against an addiction to violence). Its account of party political antics, literally deadly in their seriousness, are the most compelling I have read.

But below the surface is a parallel account of a very particular person.

You follow Sebastian's, one of the family member's, trajectory from idle bourgeois to capable soldier to idealistic party member to critic to...

Saint. A very particular saint in an age without God (or where God is apparently silent). You follow Sebastian's emergence as confronted by power, his fall, imprisonment, he discovers, in his confinement, an overriding obligation of conscience - namely to love the world. It is a love that may or may not be anchored in anything beyond itself - either in God or nature - but there it is, emerging at precisely the moment when everything appears lost, degraded.  'All' you have to do is step into love and will it towards your fellow human beings. The account of this is probably one of the most accomplished descriptions of a conversion that I know (and of a 'mystical' experience).

This, of course, creates consternation in his world. First because there is no ideology involved, nothing to believe, merely a practice of love. Second because how do you identify and condemn such freedom from the party's point of view if not formulated as an 'opposition'?

As Dostoyevsky discovered, it is notoriously difficult to write about a saint but Dumtriu beautifully does so because essentially Sebastian's perspective emerges fully from his experience and makes no claim on the beliefs of the reader only their witnessing and assent or dissent.

Love or not is a simple, if challenging, choice.

Meanwhile, 'Incognito' languishes unread in English at least (though it remains in print in French) which is a deep and abiding pity.

Once I met a fellow reader and we fell into an entranced conversation that felt timeless!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more