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Living Tissue, 10x10
With each chapter embodying a separate Commandment, Living Tissue, 10x10 is both a Decalogue and a ribald, exuberant, deliriously inventive postmodern Decameron, which covers four decades in the life of the protagonist, unfolding against the backdrop of Soviet and post-communist Moldova, from the untimely death of Yuri Gagarin in 1968 to the so-called “twitter revolution” of 2009. Tens of tragical, comical, fantastical, historical tales intertwine, punctuated by the endless upheavals suffered by twentieth-century Moldova. But the narrative also takes euphoric flight, in episodes that travel as far afield as Paris, Moscow, and Tibet. In Living Tissue. 10x10, Emilian Galaicu-Păun engages in literary origami, bending and blending together real and fictional worlds, abolishing up and down, here and there, past and present, as if in an Escher engraving, alternating narrative techniques, braiding myth, history and literary allusion, transgressing the boundaries of languages and cultures to create a rapturously intricate novel in ten dimensions.
- GenresRomanian Literature
346 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
3 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Emilian Galaicu-Păun
48 books15 followersPoet, prozator, eseist, traducător și editor român din Basarabia, editor-șef al editurii Cartier din Chișinău.
A absolvit Facultatea de Litere a Universității de Stat din Chișinău (1986) și și-a sustinut doctoratul la Institutul de Literatură „M. Gorki” din Moscova (1989).
Este colaborator permanent la revista „Vatra” din Târgu Mureș și redactor-șef al Editura Cartier din Chișinău. Emilian Galaicu-Păun este coleg de generație cu Eugen Cioclea, Nicolea Popa, Vasile Gârneț, s.a. Poetul aparține generației optzeciste din Basarabia.
Membru al Uniunii Scriitorilor din Republica Moldova și România
Membru fondator al ASPRO
Membru al PEN-clubului
A absolvit Facultatea de Litere a Universității de Stat din Chișinău (1986) și și-a sustinut doctoratul la Institutul de Literatură „M. Gorki” din Moscova (1989).
Este colaborator permanent la revista „Vatra” din Târgu Mureș și redactor-șef al Editura Cartier din Chișinău. Emilian Galaicu-Păun este coleg de generație cu Eugen Cioclea, Nicolea Popa, Vasile Gârneț, s.a. Poetul aparține generației optzeciste din Basarabia.
Membru al Uniunii Scriitorilor din Republica Moldova și România
Membru fondator al ASPRO
Membru al PEN-clubului
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October 16, 2024Limits of Hysteria
This is a wonderful and sometimes debilitatingly exhausting display of intense fears, grudges, mad desires, projections, self-justifications, hyperactive associations, uncensored and wildly swinging doubts and hopes, paranoias and repressions. Its narrator is tremulous, uncontrolled, even pixillated. It reminds me of Gombrowicz's conjurings of naked childhood, although I suspect that's too distant a cultural connection, and there must be a closer precedent.
The texture of the "living tissue" is nubbly and stringy, spongy and elastic. Many pages have footnotes explaining the narrator's continuous use of Russian jokes, puns, songs, and sayings, and his equally frequent plays on the Romanian language. The book is also steeped in Russian official jargon and pedagogic slogans. The narrator's father is a frighteningly rigid and hopelessly devoted follower of Russian ideals. Under that shadow his son is a wormlike creature, struggling not to be squashed, looking out for every scrap that might sustain him. (As Gombrowicz would have said, the son is often "dealt the pupa"—made into a servile creature.)
All that is unremitting, and so is the language. As far as I can tell, the translator, Alistair Ian Blyth, deserves an award for finding English equivalents to Moldovian sentences that appear to want desperately to break the rules of grammar and become anacoluthons or messes of run-on clauses. They mirror the narrator's desperate frame of mind, running like a cockroach to avoid being stomped, trying to evade the unhappy present, hoping to escape into some chain of associations that veers off into romantic fantasy or dreams of liberty and prosperity.
It's raw and honest, and very much about literature—and as a result it's squalid and erudite at the same time, or perhaps infantile and political. The narrator's foaming consciousness is unable to stand in the face of serious literary precedents, unwilling to construct critical distance or narrative architecture, and that is a limitation of perpetual hysteria, even if it is propelled by hopelessness.
This overspilling excessiveness is dammed up at the end. After the tenth section, there are a dozen pages with brief texts inside boxes. It's called "The Last Wish Columbarium" (hence the boxes, like niches). The texts are personal notes from the author to himself, fragments of epitaphs, and brief poems. Some of it is moving, like eight very short poems to the narrator's mother. (These remind me, at an even greater cultural distance, of Geoffrey Hill's "Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz.") Some is bizarre, like a short poem linking Celan to Romy Schneider. (That one sounds like the author is wary of saying what he really feels about Celan.) There's also a page dedicated to Romanian authors, including "M.M." (= Mariana Marin). Galaicu-Păun is sober and honest about his literary and loving associations, and these pages are a beautiful quiet ending to the hysteria.
Two smaller notes:
This book led me to the translator's book Card Catalogue, also published by Dalkey. That's not entirely unlike Living Tissue. 10 X 10 in its concern with the sometimes nauseating confluence of literature and squalor. There are also footnotes in Card Catalogue, and a large part of it is occupied with a series of single-page essays on cockroaches in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Card Catalogue is quieter than Galaicu-Păun, and its literary fantasy is more like Vila-Matas, but his eye, ear, and nose for various sorts of decay are just as sharp. And he is a spectacular translator.
The second note is about language and politics. I would have loved to hear more, in Blyth's footnotes, about the interaction of Moldavian and Romanian usages. As far as I can tell regional differences in language are a theme in this book—but it's hard to know how that works because the decision has been made to render some of those differences into English instead of explaining them in footnotes. There's also the strange fact that the narrator spells his capital city "Ch----ău" instead of Chișinău. Blyth explained this to me, and it makes a great anecdote. "The reason," he says, "is that Chișinău contains an expletive, but only due to a peculiarity of the Moldavian dialect (i.e., the dialect spoken in both Moldova/Bessarabia and eastern Romania, the historical principality of Moldavia), found mainly among rural and uneducated speakers, whereby the word-initial syllable pi- of standard Romanian is pronounced ki- (chi- in Romanian orthography): for example, the standard picior (leg, foot) becomes chicior, and, pertinently to the case at hand, mă piș (I piss) becomes mă chiș. Mă piș/chiș pe ... (I piss on ...) is frequently used as an exclamation of contempt" (email, October 2024).
This is a wonderful and sometimes debilitatingly exhausting display of intense fears, grudges, mad desires, projections, self-justifications, hyperactive associations, uncensored and wildly swinging doubts and hopes, paranoias and repressions. Its narrator is tremulous, uncontrolled, even pixillated. It reminds me of Gombrowicz's conjurings of naked childhood, although I suspect that's too distant a cultural connection, and there must be a closer precedent.
The texture of the "living tissue" is nubbly and stringy, spongy and elastic. Many pages have footnotes explaining the narrator's continuous use of Russian jokes, puns, songs, and sayings, and his equally frequent plays on the Romanian language. The book is also steeped in Russian official jargon and pedagogic slogans. The narrator's father is a frighteningly rigid and hopelessly devoted follower of Russian ideals. Under that shadow his son is a wormlike creature, struggling not to be squashed, looking out for every scrap that might sustain him. (As Gombrowicz would have said, the son is often "dealt the pupa"—made into a servile creature.)
All that is unremitting, and so is the language. As far as I can tell, the translator, Alistair Ian Blyth, deserves an award for finding English equivalents to Moldovian sentences that appear to want desperately to break the rules of grammar and become anacoluthons or messes of run-on clauses. They mirror the narrator's desperate frame of mind, running like a cockroach to avoid being stomped, trying to evade the unhappy present, hoping to escape into some chain of associations that veers off into romantic fantasy or dreams of liberty and prosperity.
It's raw and honest, and very much about literature—and as a result it's squalid and erudite at the same time, or perhaps infantile and political. The narrator's foaming consciousness is unable to stand in the face of serious literary precedents, unwilling to construct critical distance or narrative architecture, and that is a limitation of perpetual hysteria, even if it is propelled by hopelessness.
This overspilling excessiveness is dammed up at the end. After the tenth section, there are a dozen pages with brief texts inside boxes. It's called "The Last Wish Columbarium" (hence the boxes, like niches). The texts are personal notes from the author to himself, fragments of epitaphs, and brief poems. Some of it is moving, like eight very short poems to the narrator's mother. (These remind me, at an even greater cultural distance, of Geoffrey Hill's "Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz.") Some is bizarre, like a short poem linking Celan to Romy Schneider. (That one sounds like the author is wary of saying what he really feels about Celan.) There's also a page dedicated to Romanian authors, including "M.M." (= Mariana Marin). Galaicu-Păun is sober and honest about his literary and loving associations, and these pages are a beautiful quiet ending to the hysteria.
Two smaller notes:
This book led me to the translator's book Card Catalogue, also published by Dalkey. That's not entirely unlike Living Tissue. 10 X 10 in its concern with the sometimes nauseating confluence of literature and squalor. There are also footnotes in Card Catalogue, and a large part of it is occupied with a series of single-page essays on cockroaches in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Card Catalogue is quieter than Galaicu-Păun, and its literary fantasy is more like Vila-Matas, but his eye, ear, and nose for various sorts of decay are just as sharp. And he is a spectacular translator.
The second note is about language and politics. I would have loved to hear more, in Blyth's footnotes, about the interaction of Moldavian and Romanian usages. As far as I can tell regional differences in language are a theme in this book—but it's hard to know how that works because the decision has been made to render some of those differences into English instead of explaining them in footnotes. There's also the strange fact that the narrator spells his capital city "Ch----ău" instead of Chișinău. Blyth explained this to me, and it makes a great anecdote. "The reason," he says, "is that Chișinău contains an expletive, but only due to a peculiarity of the Moldavian dialect (i.e., the dialect spoken in both Moldova/Bessarabia and eastern Romania, the historical principality of Moldavia), found mainly among rural and uneducated speakers, whereby the word-initial syllable pi- of standard Romanian is pronounced ki- (chi- in Romanian orthography): for example, the standard picior (leg, foot) becomes chicior, and, pertinently to the case at hand, mă piș (I piss) becomes mă chiș. Mă piș/chiș pe ... (I piss on ...) is frequently used as an exclamation of contempt" (email, October 2024).
abandoned
August 28, 2022DNF halfway through the "hopscotch" chapter sequence.
This creative novel contains a collection of events and memories, which may or may not be autobiographical, depicting points in a man's youth and his childhood growing up in Soviet Moldova. Galaicu-Păun paints a bleak, visceral portrait of coming-of-age as the unfavored son of an abusive father within a society submissive to the state. The narrative mixes timelines, realism/surrealism, and plays on words that reveal the fluidity of language and meaning across time.
It is hard to find Moldovan literature in English translation, and I had every intention of finishing this book for that reason alone. However, the recurring profanity and sexual content were too much for me. I can cringe through one or two occurrences, but there was hardly a chapter without elaborate descriptions of sex and/or body parts in erotic detail. The book is also framed around "ten commandments," veering into irreverence that made me uneasy as a Christian. Personally I did not think either of these components were necessary to the core of the book - either way, it wasn't for me.
This creative novel contains a collection of events and memories, which may or may not be autobiographical, depicting points in a man's youth and his childhood growing up in Soviet Moldova. Galaicu-Păun paints a bleak, visceral portrait of coming-of-age as the unfavored son of an abusive father within a society submissive to the state. The narrative mixes timelines, realism/surrealism, and plays on words that reveal the fluidity of language and meaning across time.
It is hard to find Moldovan literature in English translation, and I had every intention of finishing this book for that reason alone. However, the recurring profanity and sexual content were too much for me. I can cringe through one or two occurrences, but there was hardly a chapter without elaborate descriptions of sex and/or body parts in erotic detail. The book is also framed around "ten commandments," veering into irreverence that made me uneasy as a Christian. Personally I did not think either of these components were necessary to the core of the book - either way, it wasn't for me.
November 23, 2020
Am gasit emisiunea Asfalt de Moldova de la Jurnal TV cu Emilian Galaicu-Păun şi mi-a fost interesant să leg firele biografice din emisiune cu cele din romanul autobiografic Țesut viu. 10x10
E...n Galaicu-Păun scrie interesant și condensa(n)t. Dar nu o face pentru cititorii săi (potențiali sau reali) ci doar pentru el însuși. Pare că intenționat modelează frazele astfel ca nimeni să nu mai înțeleagă vreodată ce a vrut să spună. Alteori autorul pare a se "juca cu puța": face/scrie ceva care îi produce satisfacție și descoperă lucruri uimitoare/inedite, face experimente cu propriul corp/text. Însă dintr-o parte oricum arată ca un (enfant)il preocupat de lucruri banale, oarecum rușinoase, poate chiar ridicole, dacă nu dezgustătoare. Fragmentele autobiografice savuroase și cele de analiză socială sînt amestecate laolaltă cu proză surrealistă, pornografie, texte populare gen "la popa la poartă" sau bancuri sovietice, jocuri cu textul, citate pretențioase în franceză (netraduse). Pagini care se citesc dintr-o răsuflare alternează cu texte aproape incomprehensibile, pe care le dezghioci cu orele ca pe cine știe ce Κρυπτογραφία. Se pare că autorul este unul răsfățat (de editori sau/şi de critici) și nu mai depune nici un efort pentru a cuceri și cititorul (ordinar sau elitist). Păcat. Cărțile obișnuiesc să se perpetueze mai ales dacă sînt citite. Citite din/cu plăcere.
E...n Galaicu-Păun scrie interesant și condensa(n)t. Dar nu o face pentru cititorii săi (potențiali sau reali) ci doar pentru el însuși. Pare că intenționat modelează frazele astfel ca nimeni să nu mai înțeleagă vreodată ce a vrut să spună. Alteori autorul pare a se "juca cu puța": face/scrie ceva care îi produce satisfacție și descoperă lucruri uimitoare/inedite, face experimente cu propriul corp/text. Însă dintr-o parte oricum arată ca un (enfant)il preocupat de lucruri banale, oarecum rușinoase, poate chiar ridicole, dacă nu dezgustătoare. Fragmentele autobiografice savuroase și cele de analiză socială sînt amestecate laolaltă cu proză surrealistă, pornografie, texte populare gen "la popa la poartă" sau bancuri sovietice, jocuri cu textul, citate pretențioase în franceză (netraduse). Pagini care se citesc dintr-o răsuflare alternează cu texte aproape incomprehensibile, pe care le dezghioci cu orele ca pe cine știe ce Κρυπτογραφία. Se pare că autorul este unul răsfățat (de editori sau/şi de critici) și nu mai depune nici un efort pentru a cuceri și cititorul (ordinar sau elitist). Păcat. Cărțile obișnuiesc să se perpetueze mai ales dacă sînt citite. Citite din/cu plăcere.
November 20, 2020
”...deci, primul gând care l-am prins (clar) după ce am citit cartea aceasta, era să strig:
- Muie Liiceanu! (Care a scris pe coperta a patra a "Solenoid"-ului lui Mircea Cărtărescu următoarele: "Primul gând când am terminat a fost să îmi scriu pe cartea de vizită |Eu am citit ''Solenoid''|"
El nu a citit Țesutul lui Galaicu-Păun, altminteri demult îi fugea Păltinișul de sub picioare.”
- Muie Liiceanu! (Care a scris pe coperta a patra a "Solenoid"-ului lui Mircea Cărtărescu următoarele: "Primul gând când am terminat a fost să îmi scriu pe cartea de vizită |Eu am citit ''Solenoid''|"
El nu a citit Țesutul lui Galaicu-Păun, altminteri demult îi fugea Păltinișul de sub picioare.”
July 10, 2025
Un roman formidabil, țesut cu iscusință într-un grai cât se poate de viu. În neștire l-am ținut pe raft vreo zece anișori, dar acum că l-am consumat, pot să zic că s-a maturat ca un vin de soi. Taninos. Finuț. Complex. În funcție de etapa lecturii.
Cu aluzie la leagănul pisicii (în copilărie îi ziceam pur și simplu "răzâncă") țesutul viu e împletitura metaforică de destine, un joc la patru mâini, din care se compune o autobiografie literară. Dezbrăcat de amintiri, autorul rămâne de-a pururi îmbrăcat în eul liric. Tot el – fratele mai mare, tot el – litera ...n anexată la numele bunicii Emilia.
Cred că e unicul text în română în care limba pe care am vorbit-o în copilărie și adolescență sună exact așa cum mi-o amintesc: cu rusisme atunci când trecerea la română era dictată de circumstanțe, abandonată atunci când circumstanțele se schimbau, reconstruită, cu tot cu conștiința națională, din modestele materiale pe care le aveam la îndemână la începutul anilor 90. Recomandat 100%.
Cu aluzie la leagănul pisicii (în copilărie îi ziceam pur și simplu "răzâncă") țesutul viu e împletitura metaforică de destine, un joc la patru mâini, din care se compune o autobiografie literară. Dezbrăcat de amintiri, autorul rămâne de-a pururi îmbrăcat în eul liric. Tot el – fratele mai mare, tot el – litera ...n anexată la numele bunicii Emilia.
Cred că e unicul text în română în care limba pe care am vorbit-o în copilărie și adolescență sună exact așa cum mi-o amintesc: cu rusisme atunci când trecerea la română era dictată de circumstanțe, abandonată atunci când circumstanțele se schimbau, reconstruită, cu tot cu conștiința națională, din modestele materiale pe care le aveam la îndemână la începutul anilor 90. Recomandat 100%.
March 11, 2024
Living Tissue. 10 x 10. Half the time I didn't know who was who saying what and why. Hard to follow, yes, but what hell. As the author states - this text is "labyrinthine and kaleidoscopic". Indeed. The narrative jumps about like a gnome on a spacehopper. I fell into the dense, intricate flow: its nostalgic and flamboyant style where I (perchance) dreamed of a more compelling cohesion. It's some kind of chaotic autobiography; memories transmogrified into ghosts. Feels "novel" in the literal sense. An abstract symphony in word-form. I felt what could possibly be called good confusion. Anyway, the shadow of utopian tyranny chills everyplace.
September 28, 2025
Team Tabula Rasa
November 22, 2015
Nu este una dintre acele carti la care e usor sa revii a doua zi. Cere efort. Pana la pagina 220, am trait senzatia c-as fi prins cu personajele pe o barca in mijlocul oceanului leganati intermitent de valuri mici fara tel sau identitate.
Dar este inteligent scrisa. Cu siguranta - excentric.
Dar este inteligent scrisa. Cu siguranta - excentric.
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