Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony Fantastic Tales

by Gheorghe Săsărman, Ursula K. Le Guin (Translation)

"The idea of writing a book of brief descriptions of imaginary cities, condensing into it the grandure and tragedy of five milliennia of urban history, came to me by chance, while I was in charge of the Architecture and Urbanism section of the review Scânteia. A writer had protested in an open letter against the demolition of an historic building, and the editors asked me to respond, which I did by writing the story "Musaeum." It was the autumn of 1969, a year after the Russian tanks invaded Prague, an invasion openly condemned by Ceauşescu, a time when many people, not only in Bucharest, believe (what a mistake!) that Romania was evolving towards democaracy."
—From the author's postscript to the French edition, 1992

"Squaring the Circle is highly readable. And it's fun. It gives us all the pleasure of a travel guide, and the addiitional pleasure of being—in spite of the meticulous description—unreal. As it turns out, a cityscape can be as interesting as a bildungsroman and as meaningful. The first section of Squaring the Circle, 'Vavylon,' is a fine description of a class society that claims to be egalitarian. Anyone can climb to the top of the ziggurat, except the ramps are greased. I thought of Stalinist Romania when I read it, but it could also apply to the US."
—Eleanor Arnason, author of A Woman of the Iron People and Tomb of the Fathers

"These trippy, cutting 24 stories, chosen by SF/F grande dame Le Guin from a collection of 36 originally published in Romanian in 1975, inevitably draw comparisons to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Both explore society and human psyche through architectural descriptions of imaginary cities, but Săsărman's masterfully crafted prose poems feel more immediate, serving as spellbinding descriptions of architectural impossibilities as well as slyly subversive social commentary."
—Publishers Weekly March 11, 2013.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fantasy, Romania, Cities

121 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Gheorghe Săsărman spent his childhood and attended high-school in Cluj, Transylvania's capital-city. He studied architecture in Bucharest and after graduation was employed as a journalist, authoring articles on architecture and popular science. In 1978 he received his Ph.D. in the theory of architecture with the dissertation Function, Space, Architecture (later published as an essay). Politically constrained to abandon his activity as a media writer, he left Ceauşescu’s Romania in 1983 and settled in Munich, Germany, where he worked as a computer programmer and analyst. He is married, has a daughter and a son and has become a grandfather.

After the fall of the communist regime (1989) he resumed his activity as a journalist, contributing to Romanian newspapers and magazines and to various publications of the Romanian diaspora texts later collected in the volume Between Parallel Mirrors (2009). Between 2006--2010, in Munich, he edited the review The Apposition, a sui-generis almanach written by Romanian-born men of culture living abroad. He is a member of the Professional Journalists’ Union and of the Romanian Writers' Union.

Săsărman made his debut as a writer in 1962, when he won the first prize at a SF short-story contest organized for seven East-European countries. His first book, The Oracle (1969) grouped texts previously published in periodicals. His best-known work, Squaring the Circle (1975), clashed with the communist censorship, which cut out one quarter of its contents; also published in France (1994) and Spain (2010), this book is edited by Aqueduct Press, in Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent translation. A story in the volume Chimera (1979), "Algernon's Escape"—whose title paraphrases that of Daniel Keyes’s famous novel—brought the author the Europa Award at the Eurocon V Convention (1980). The novel 2000 (1982) was published in German in Munich, as Die Enklaven der Zeit (1986). After 1989, he resumed publishing fiction in his native country: the novels The Hemlock Cup (1994), South vs. North (2001), The Unparallelled Adventures of Anton Retegan and of His Secret Police File (2011), as well as the short-story collection Visions (2007). His play Deus ex Machina was staged in Munich (2005) and Bucharest (2006-2009). Săsărman has published short stories and novellas in magazines, anthologies and collective volumes in Romania, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Japan. In 2012, he was awarded the "Ion Hobana" Opera Omnia Prize by the Bucharest branch of the Writers' Union and the Romanian Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sah-Harah
by GHEORGHE SĂSĂRMAN
TRANSLATED BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

What a lovely a surprise to find in Lightspeed magazine a romanian author! I'm really thrilled about it because his stories are amazing.

Too bad there is just one here; is part from an original collection of 36 stories (Cuadratura cercului) from which about 24 (not sure about the number tho) were translated by Ursula K. Le Guin and comprised in this volume: Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony Fantastic Tales.

It's really nice as a stand alone too but would be better appreciated if you get the chance of reading the entire collection. A collection in which the main characters are not people, but cities.

And here are the images of these cities; which one do you think it belongs to Sah-Harah? ;)



Can be read here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fic...

[Tyrannosaurus regina · Rating 5 out of 5]

The very premise of this volume enchanted me: a series of descriptions of cities that never were. These are not fantasy worlds but fantasy cities in our world, some a plausible product of the cultural and physical shaping of the world we know, some more firmly rooted in fiction and mythology. It sounds like something I would want to create myself, the kind of disjointed, concrete creativity that I love. This is a translation of a translation (from the original Romanian through Spanish), and only incorporates about two thirds of the original book, but the translation nonethless captures something special—there is something completely magical and haunting about the prose, and about these cities. It would be impossible to pick a favourite, but I found Sah-Harah, Dava and Selenia to be particularly affecting. Each of the segments is powerful in its own way.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you liked Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, you would probably like this.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of related short stories was interesting, but of variable actual quality. The original author was apparently attempting to create a sort of consistent mythos within some of the stories, but that occasionally fizzled with me. Not to say that the stories were bad, only that I didn't care for some of them in terms of style or content. There were none where I wanted to stop reading the book, which is a very short one.
Overall, the collection is worth reading if you like magical realism, or if you want to see what Ursula K. LeGuin was translating in her spare time.

[Wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

These twenty-four very short stories, fables, and parables tell of cities in ruins, waiting to be discovered, or not yet built.

[Althea Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this because: translated by Ursula LeGuin, of course!
I'm still going to maintain that LeGuin will never steer you wrong... but this slight volume was interesting, rather than amazing.

What struck me most was its similarity to another work translated by LeGuin, 'Kalpa Imperial.' While 'Kalpa Imperial' is a collection of pieces describing different eras in one imaginary empire, 'Squaring the Circle' is a similar collection of short pieces describing a variety of different imaginary cities.

(The introduction to this book notes a similarity to Calvino's 'Invisible Cities,' but I haven't read that at this time.)

I preferred 'Kalpa Imperial.' In contrast, the pieces (not really stories, per se) here are much shorter, and while I felt that they sought for Borges-like impact, I wasn't quite feeling it. Almost - but, a bit too much architecture, not quite enough human nature. The pieces feel almost like fragmentary nuggets of (future?) folktales. I liked it, but I wanted a bit more.

Still, kudos to LeGuin for bringing this Romanian author to an English-speaking audience. It's quite sad, however, that LeGuin notes that she's been doing translating as she doesn't have enough energy for her own stories, at this time (she's now 83).

[Bex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Theory-into-practice: love the theory of this small collection, but the practice did not resonate with me.