Waiting: Stories

by Dumitru Tsepeneag, Patrick Camiller (Translator)

Though best known now for his novels, this collection of pre-exile short stories by the renowned Romanian author and "onirist" not only show Dumitru Tsepeneag at his best, but provide a glimpse into the secret history of surrealism uunder the brutal regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. In these stories, life is both banal and bizarre, on the verge of breaking down, like a film loop played once too often, with the hot glare of irrationality always waiting to burn through. Looking forward to Vain Art of the Fugue and back to Breton, Waiting is a subversive delicacy.

Genres: Romanian Literature, Short Stories, Fiction, Romania, Literature

135 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2013

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peculiar stories about the thin membrane separating the mundane from the fantastic. Or failing to separate them. It's a theme I'm always drawn to, though many of these stories are too brief to really build their dreamworlds in depth. The ones that do, like the nightmarishly looping "Through the Keyhole" recall stellar Cortazar moments of narrative bleed through. Tepeneag was a self described "Oneiricist" (were there others?!), which is another reason to be intrigued. After the stories in this collection, he switched to novel-length works, which now I really must look into as the longest here are generally the best.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly repetitive in their techniques - of repeating scenarios with variations, of (somehow) transitioning from the concretely mundane to fantastical flight, of having the narrator sneak up on himself from behind, of spinning rock solid texts out of airy nothings, of making the dreary rationally wondrous - but magic is magic, and Tsepeneag is a magician of the wakefully dreaming mind.

[Kent Priore · Rating 1 out of 5]

An incoherent mess.

[Jan Moens · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10