Pigeon Post

by Dumitru Tsepeneag

Here is a book about a man, supposedly a writer, who tries to write a novel, because he promised his readers he would. But he doesn’t have anything to say. He keeps erasing what he writes, and rewriting it, without having the slightest idea where he’s going with it. Soon enough he realizes that looking out of the window, sitting in front of his typewriter, describing anything and everything, is not enough to write a novel. His three friends, Edmond, Edgar, and Edouard, will aid him in his task . . . Pigeon Post will be the second book Dalkey Archive has published by the Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag (after the critically acclaimed Vain Art of the Fugue), and we will be publishing more of his works in the years to come.

Genres: Romanian Literature, Romania, Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, Novels

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel about writing, and a bit absurdist. A would-be writer sits in a Paris apartment but has nothing to say, so he writes to three friends he grew up with (confusingly named Edourd, Edgar and Edmond). He asks them about their lives and they more-or-less reply with what are probably half-truths. The writer has his own issues with memory and seems to be an unreliable narrator, to say the least. The book is written in almost run-on style with no chapters or subheadings. It shifts from present (mostly the activities of neighbors outside the window) to past (snippets of his childhood). On the surface there appears to be a lot of diversity as these various friends and neighbors are Vietnamese, Cambodian, black from Martinique and Algerian, but nothing comes of this that I can see. All in all this is not something I would recommend. The book is translated from the French but the author is Romanian and switched to writing in French when he was in exile in Paris during the years of the Ceausescu dictatorship.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tsepeneag is a game player, a writer who writes about writing with extreme self-consciousness of being a writer writing about writing. I would say to not even bother with him if this sort of approach bothers you, or even makes you cry This is fucking bullshit!, but (and I must say this sort of approach often rubs me the wrong way) Tsepeneag does it with a difference.

The difference being that there’s something extra-literary at work here, something that speaks to the reader’s consciousness and awareness and how he/she processes stimuli, whether internal or external. This is plausible as he founded a lit movement in Romania in the 1960’s named Onirism, which in some ways furthered the Surrealist agenda, but which was/is more intent on using automatic writing in a larger more intentionally structured format; and, as the name suggests, Onirism aspired to the logic of dreams and/or hallucinations. I cannot say that the two novels of his I’ve so far read resembled hallucinations, or even dreams, to me, but as I read them something did begin happening in my head, something new and interesting and (most importantly) something extra-literary. I do not mean something transcendent. I mean something like a rearranging of small parts of my brain as I read, which allowed light and air into dark and unused spots, a freeing up of faculties. But even as I say this I have my suspicions that Tsepeneag would refute the notion that there is anything extra-literary about his literary production, that he would say to expect anything extra-literary from a work of literature is pure foolishness. Was he indeed parodying this notion in Hotel Europa with the recurring UFO theme? Was the woman looking up into the sky at the conclusion of that novel a representative of the foolish reader or the ideal reader? I don’t know, and I don’t know that I care. I very much enjoyed reading the book, as I very much enjoyed reading this book.

Pigeon Post is a book about a writer writing a book. The book that is being read is a record of the process of writing the book itself. It is an intentionally undermining of the reader’s expectations blahblahblah. Yeah, who really cares about this kind of “radicalism” anymore? But Tsepeneag does it with a casually fun flair that is eminently engaging; and anyway he doesn’t stop at that simple undermining of intentions, he also puts forth a compositional technique based on music – progressive classical music, and he weaves chess and its playing into the text, as well as having Nabokov stand in as the unnamed and mysterious presiding spirit of the whole operation. Though I didn’t quite catch them I am sure there wee numerous references to Nabokov’s last two books in Pigeon Post. I even suspect that this book is an attempt to one-up the master. But this is pure speculation, as I don’t really care to ferret out the references and get all egg-headed about the experience. I will leave that to the dear eggheads, as I’m moving on! … to reread Nabokov’s last two novels.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Senryu Review:

Fragmented madness
from a self-erasing man
from Romania.

[Jack · Rating 1 out of 5]

In writing a novel about a man writing a novel, Tsepeneag flips a coin: shall he delight his reader with sly asides on the creative process and interludes musing on Fiction As A Whole, or will he irritate them, his recurrent breaks in storytelling to question the reader on why they are reading answered in a tone of quiet sorrow - because this is a short novel, one I'm almost finished reading, so I might as well.
Naturally in his conceit, he addresses his book's divisive subject.

'What's more critical, even dangerous, is that you stake too much on casual inference. You lock your characters into the confines of shallow humor, forgetting that funny, alas, isn't funny for long... The true novelist plows a much broader field, sowing his seeds toward a far-off horizon, conveying to his readers deeper truths, tragic though they may be. He makes them blossom before the readers' eyes. In a word, he moves them, he fulfills them.
You give your reader too much freedom (note "reader" in the singular), and then you abandon him.'

Fair enough. I'm off to find a 'true novelist'.

[David Ferrers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nancy was my first love.