Adam and Eve... take 7

I'm going to try something new and post as I go! Yes, the inovative idea is actually to post a couple small sections a day or every other day rather than a big fat post at the end. My biggest challenge will be trying to stay within a 100-150 word range per post, but with that kind of a limit (and knowing it won't take me an hour like my other posts do), I'll be more likely to post more frequently. (Or so I'm trying to convince myself.)

So, I've started reading Adam and Eve (Rebreanu) today. I didn't make it past the foreword, though, because there was so much excellent content in that short essay. So I thought my very first post on the book would be from there.

"Liviu Rebreanu is today rightly considered to be the greatest of all Romanian novelists. His writings (novels, short stories, drama, dramatic criticism, essays, lectures, etc.) were composed between 1908–1944, a career at its highest in the thirties, the period that marked the flourishing of modern Romanian fiction with the works of M. Sadoveanu, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, Camil Petrescu, Mateiu I. Caragiale, Mircea Eliade, Gib Mihaescu, Cezar Petrescu, and others alongside Liviu Rebreanu. Between the two world wars, this distinguished group of writers extremely diverse in individuality and originality achieved (in the novel, above all) a synchronization with new narrative forms, sometimes parallel with the esthetic experiments of Proust, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, W. Faulkner, Franz Kafka, at other times anticipating the visions of the French existentialist novel. Liviu Rebreanu holds a central position in the movement for the renewal of Romanian fiction after the first world war, not only by making a stand against the outdated romanticism of 1900, but also by his faithfulness to a classical tradition adapted to modernism refusing, however, the avant-garde experimentalism. […]

"Rebreanu stands out as an exponent of the tendency to synchronize tradition and modernism, a premise to a ‘new classicism’ in Romanian literature in the years before the Second World War.

"[…Rebreanu preferred] the broad projects of epic and dramatic structures, he was for inner tension and rhythm ‘without which no novel however valuable it may be, can captivate its readers.’ […]

"From his very first short stories, Rebreanu brought an unusual manly vigor, a tough and somber vision of reality. He refused any stylization of chromaticism and reintroduced into fiction the naturalistic observation of human life. He brought back, as one of his most profound commentators, Tudor Vianu, put it, the underdog and his precarious social condition. Furthermore, from the very beginning, he projected his ‘naturalism’ on to a cosmic backdrop, the earthly plane having acquired transcendental significance. That is how the young writer handled his short story masterpieces […] in which rugged human beings animated by hazy aspirations are caught in the web of dramatic conflicts leading, more often than not, to tragic endings or only to confrontation with the great issues of life. […]

"The innermost movement of Rebreanu’s prose—analogous with the European trend—is to make a study of the social reality; to analyze the individual case in relationship to the study of the collective destiny; that is, from case history to diagnosis." (Mircea Zaciu)

I know that’s a mouthful, but I couldn’t have said it better than Zaciu himself. Concerning Adam and Eve, Zaciu explains that the novel consists of a seven short stories, all portraying the life of a couple, revealing in the end that sensuous love is "the unique vital principle" in life.

It appears Rebreanu himself preferred this novel about the rest, as revealed in a quote included in the forward: "of all the books I have written so far, Adam and Eve is the one I like best. Maybe because in it there is more hope if not even a certain kind of comfort, because in it man’s life is beyond an earthly beginning and end, and finally because Adam and Eve is a book of eternal illusions."

So there you have it: a critical introduction to Rebreanu’s authoritative word on love. This will be interesting…