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The Phantom Church and Other Stories from Romania. Florin Manolescu, comp. Georgiana Farnoaga, Sharon King, eds. & trs. Pittsburgh, Pa. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1997 ((C) 1996). xxiv + 240 pages. $44 ($19.95 paper). ISBN 08229-3971-7 (5608-X paper).
The stories collected in The Phantom Church were produced between 1949 and 1996. In normal circumstances, half a century of literature should be able to display its performances: the work of several generations of writers, the rise and fall of literary currents, the literature's treasures and its debris. But circumstances were far from normal in the Romania of this half-century, as the vely useful chronology (1940-90) and the introduction bv Florin Manolescu, literary historian and professor of literature at Bucharest University, explain. For five decades, dictatorship destroyed Romania's physical and cultural existence with methods described best by the Romanian poet Daniela Crasnaru: "they tramp in their barbaric boots / through my brain, into my spirit, into the divine part of me." Yet writing in Romania went on, and it is anthologies like this which enable us to understand how "the divine part" of several generations of writers survived, even though, as the same poet goes on...