When a friend told me that she had a job in Moldova and that she was going there, I immediately remembered Tatiana Tibouleac. He already knew something of that country, yet another of the peripherals that once orbited around the Soviet Union.
And perhaps precisely from that ignorance is even more shocking the appearance of an author charged with that rabid authenticity of who writes shaking well the cocktail of entrails and soul, without waiting to see what results, ready to give the drink either elixir, absinthe or hemlock. Because after all, everything is a placebo of the moment, of existence. Sorrows and guilt are cured by the fire of alcohol and good literature, capable of awakening that bluish fire, raised in degrees, that comes from deep within.
The crudest and most intentional realism must also have the dreamlike, with the regret adapted by the subconscious in each new dream, transformed to be able to continue living. Tatiana plays our psychiatrist, but knowing how to cure herself first, making good the Latin quote "medice cura te ipsum."
The Romanian part of this author seems at times to be occupied by another illustrious Romanian like Emil cioran, with that pessimism in search of a cure. Only Tatiana does not recreate in perdition, because her narrative conviction seems more aimed at making peace with everything, in the end it is about that for any good purpose to undertake.
Top recommended novels of Tatiana Tibuleac
The summer my mother had green eyes
Time is what it is. And your mother may never have had green eyes. It may even, friend Aleksy, that your traffic jam does not come from notions of guilt or the consequent penalty. Because the most tormented soul creates to survive, you can't stop doing it ...
Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother. Many years have passed since then, but, when his psychiatrist recommends reliving that time as a possible remedy for the artistic blockage that he is suffering as a painter, Aleksy soon immerses himself in his memory and is once again shaken by the emotions that besieged him when they arrived. to that French holiday village: resentment, sadness, anger.
How to overcome the disappearance of your sister? How to forgive the mother who rejected him? How to deal with the disease that is consuming you? This is the story of a summer of reconciliation, of three months in which mother and son finally put down their weapons, spurred on by the arrival of the inevitable and by the need to make peace with each other and with themselves.
Full of emotion and rawness, Tatiana Ţîbuleac shows an extremely intense narrative force in this brutal testimony that combines resentment, impotence and the fragility of mother-child relationships. A powerful novel that intertwines life and death in an appeal to love and forgiveness. One of the great discoveries of current European literature.
The glass garden
Every history of a country, under its glorious national agenda, narrated with the necessary epic, is dotted with those intrahistories that really trace the paths of the other national reality, a much more certain imaginary about the best and the worst that can happen when the life flares up.
Moldova in the gray years of communism. Old woman Tamara Pavlovna rescues little Lastotchka from an orphanage. What at first may seem like an act of mercy hides a terrifying reality. Lastotchka has been bought as a slave, to be exploited for almost a decade collecting bottles on the street.
Learning to survive by stealing and begging, rejecting the requests of overly insistent men, in an environment of violence and misery. Based on the author's own family history, The Glass Garden is, above all, an exercise in domestic exorcism, a letter imagined by a girl to her unknown parents where the pain due to their abandonment, the lack of love and the absence of Tenderness and emotion are shown as wounds that may never fully heal.
The mercilessness of the best Dickens and the kaleidoscopic writing of Agota Kristoff make this second novel by Tatiana Tîbuleac a tragedy that is as cruel and compassionate as it is revealing of what destiny and its beauty have in store for us.
