Doina
Ruști

Over the years, Doina Ruști’s novels have been discussed by major Romanian and international critics. Her works — from the magical realism of The Book of Perilous Dishes to the autobiographical Ferenike — have inspired essays, interviews, and reviews in publications such as Observator Cultural, News.ro, La Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Manifesto, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Adevărul, Evenimentul Zilei, and others.

This section collects a selection of critical responses, offering readers an overview of how her fiction has been received both in Romania and abroad.

Critical Reper

The most striking quality of Doina Ruști’s writing, visible across all her books, is the imaginative verve from which her stories are woven—the inexhaustible energy that gives birth to characters and narrative threads. Although shaped within the conventions of the historical novel, Ruști’s prose uses historical hypotheses as pretexts for exploring fantastic scenarios, blending fiction and metafiction into an alloy of magical realism that brings her close to the great South American masters, with whose work numerous correspondences may be drawn. The fabulous stories in Zogru, The Book of Perilous Dishes, The Ghost in the Mill, or The Phanariot Manuscript are, almost without exception, also stories about the act of storytelling itself—subtle metanarratives on the nature of fiction, its status, and its relationship with reality. Integral

Romanian novelist Doina Ruști is known as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature. She is prolific and widely translated, having written dozens of novels, including the Phanariot Manuscript, part of a trilogy, alongside various collections of short stories.

In The Ghost in the Mill, she channels the experience of her upbringing, during the chaos of the end of communism, into a parable on a society formed by oppression and overbearing rules. Meanwhile, Lizoanca at the Age of 11 is the story of a child charged with atrocities actually committed by her accusers.

When Ruști was 11 years old, her father was murdered in circumstances that remain mysterious. She has written about that in a different book, the recently published Ferenike. She spoke to Al Majalla about blending magical realism with lived experience, depicting Romanian national identity and being most famous for writing about food. This is the conversation.

At times humorous, at others tragic and fierce, sometimes fantastic and luminous like a Chagall painting, what predominates in this wonderful story, Zogru, is the figure of the terrible loneliness in which the human spirit finds itself when deprived of love.

The ghost is the narrative catalyst that brings secret forces to the surface, especially of a sexual nature, and is also the most visible behavior, the sole faith—dissolved as well in the last part of the novel.

Doina Ruști’s book showcases a wide range of literary aptitudes that measure resilience in Romanian history of the 20th century.

“Ferenike opens as a promise of escape from a corrosive reality and, together with the strong aromas of that forgotten, fading world, seizes the reader and holds them captive in the fogs of their own guilt, which they roll along with the protagonist, all the way into the unprotected, raw, sincere core of the soul—terribly contagious.” (Adrian Lesenciuc, Cultura)

“Zogru is an adventure book, singular—and at the same time a re-reading of Romanian history through an imaginary tied to folk legends, as well as a parable about love, death, and power—conflicts along which the sense of belonging to a territory has major value.” (Leonardo Sanhueza, Las Últimas Noticias)

A conversation about literature and life.

For years, the short story “Platanos” was studied in 8th-grade Romanian classes, and it generated so much interest among students and teachers that they asked the author to write a novel continuing the story.

This time, the novel—launched at the end of September by Youngart—tells of a dystopian world in which fantasy and mystery are interwoven. The titular character now takes on an unexpected role, while Sisinel discovers the city beyond the river and unravels the mystery of the vegetal world.

Platanos, also a hybrid—but far more well-read—is eager to share his knowledge with others and willing to show Sisinel the meaning of true friendship. Yet those around them can’t help but wonder where Platanos learned so much.

— Your female characters are strong, autonomous, often unconventional. What can a woman writer bring to Romanian literature today? Is it still a space dominated by male voices?

— You’ve surely noticed that when they talk about me they say “one of the most powerful feminine voices.” It’s insulting, degrading. And far from accidental. The image-builder who felt the need to specify that I’m a woman writer and nothing more still represents official, mediocre literature—the kind you either praise or you die. It isn’t a man. It isn’t a person, but the prejudice that dominates the world. When does that matter? When you notice it. If it had mattered, I’d have died long ago, in adolescence. But it didn’t matter, because if I’m only a “feminine voice” for the brand-maker, he doesn’t exist at all for me. He’s just someone without a name, without a body of work.

Read the full piece: “Traditional literature is the foundation of education…” — Interview

Melania Cincea: “The two characters in the novel, Matilda and Carol — did they really exist in Zavaidoc’s life?”

Doina Ruști: I knew you would ask! But even as I was writing the novel, I resolved to keep discretion about them. Yes, they both existed, but regarding their connection to Zavaidoc — no comment! The main narrator is Carol; she organizes the novel’s subject, with other narrators—Matilda and Zavaidoc—intervening. Yet I’m most attached to Matilda. Her voice is familiar to me, and we “met” last summer as I was looking for clues about Zavaidoc’s lodgings—not his property, but the attic I found references to. I wanted to know more, not to insert into the novel, but to soak up the atmosphere, the details of a life. So I leafed through applications by students seeking to transfer their scholarships to another faculty. There I found Matilda—slender, philologist’s handwriting—giving details about the transfer and, among other things, her Paris address, since she had won a scholarship, explaining the importance of the move. Here and there she had underlined a word, and from that thick line—coming from a blunt nib—her dramas began to grow: the emotional block and all the rest that helped me make Matilda a character. For a few days I read about Romanian scholarship students—very numerous—to understand Matilda’s dreams, but much more I read about Fanny, a secondary character who in reality is Ștefania Mărăcineanu, the scientist. Her destiny impressed me even more; still, she remained peripheral, mentioned in passing, though I told her story in full, albeit briefly.

All the characters in Matilda’s confession serve to bring Zavaidoc into focus, because he is objectified through the depositions of the narrators and through the reactions of the other characters. It was a typology-building game I enjoyed; it gave me satisfaction and strengthened my emotional ties with Zavaidoc. Equally important to me are the other characters, especially the episodic ones, many encountered in the pages of the newspapers, like Jeana. When I saw her photograph in the paper, I knew I couldn’t write any further without her.

This time, the novel—launched at the end of September by Youngart—tells of a dystopian world in which fantasy and mystery are interwoven. The titular character now takes on an unexpected role, while Sisinel discovers the city beyond the river and unravels the mystery of the vegetal world.

Adriana Irimescu: “I met Ferenike. On a bitterly cold day at the Romanian Literature Museum, Doina Ruști introduced her to me. She won me over, took me into her world, led me through dreams. Strangely, she spoke with Doina’s voice—the voice of childhood, adolescence, youth. It was wonderful and I’m sharing this because she allowed me to film her. After I met her, I read her!

I read Ferenike! I read Ferenike! Not in haste—though the pages urge you on—but with small pauses, breaths of air drawn into the intensity of the narrative.

I invite you to meet her too, whether she is called Doina Ruști, Ferenike, or Patca,” says Adriana Irimescu, who made this portrait interview broadcast on TVR Cultural.

By writing The Ghost in the Mill to exorcize the haunting specter of communist times, Doina Ruști marks an intriguing break with Romanian literary tradition. In tune with international trends, she follows the model of ghost stories to reactivate a horrifying past that won’t be stifled or silenced. By letting the inexplicable specter enter the life of a rural community under dictatorial rule, and by the dominant image of an old mill—menacing and alluring—Ruști creates a Gothic novel born of a history of fear, secrets, betrayal, and guilt. In doing so, she moves beyond the magical realismmany writers used in the late communist and early post-communist period, in attempts to escape the leveling pressure of socialist realism and its censorship. Although Gothic themes and motifs represent a departure from both old and new Romanian norms—which never truly accommodated the genre—the negotiation of collective past through Gothic tools proved successful, bringing the author laudatory criticism, acclaim, and international recognition. Ruști harnesses the genre’s interest in individual trauma and turmoil—in the shattered autonomy of the self, in the loss of coherence and integrity, in the fragmentation of consciousness, failed relationships, oppression, and suffocating anxiety. She adapts a seemingly unsuitable Gothic toolkit to Romanian social realities before December 1989, exploiting to the full the genre’s disquieting, disruptive potential, tried and retried.

Among the most important authors at Bookfest: Mircea Cărtărescu, Gabriel Liiceanu, Mircea Mihăieș, Doina Ruști, Radu Paraschivescu…

In this interview, the author of the Phanariot Trilogy—celebrated for Lizoanca, Hidden Beds, The Red Dwarf, Strange Loves in Phanariot Bucharest, The Debauchee of Gorgani, among others—argues that the benchmarks Romanians should return to are: “a return to the individual, trusting personal choices, ignoring institutions that can no longer be repaired, and the adventure of a new construction.” “All sorts of alliances of convenience, dilution of values, and above all ‘protections’ have undermined human dignity,” says Doina Ruști, who underlines that “morality is missing from society today.” She believes Romania has “many normal people—moral, intelligent, talented, capable of love,” and that “a single person can change the system, the world—everything.”

On the border between health and illness, between real and fantastic, mysticism and the everyday, this book (The Red Dwarf) explores, in a fresh style, a dystopian vision, reminding me of Dave Eggers’ The Circle, Tommaso Pincio’s Panorama, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.

An editorial evenment

In The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (Routledge, New York), edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, the novel Fantoma din moară (The Ghost in the Mill, 2008) is examined as a narrative that employs the figure of haunting in order to reassess Romania’s recent history, including the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Within the same comparative framework, Ruști’s novel is discussed alongside Manuel Rivas’s The Carpenter’s Pencil(1998), a work in which the ghost of an artist executed by the Falangist militia haunts a symbolic object and its future user. This juxtaposition highlights the ways in which the Gothic imaginary and the motif of haunting function as narrative tools for exploring historical trauma in contemporary European literature.

“Romanian author Doina Ruști’s novel The Ghost in the Mill (2008) exploits the device of haunting to revisit her nation’s recent history, including the effects of the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986.” — Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters

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The novel stands out through a singular narrative style that details the present and past of the characters, bringing together the reminiscences of communism and high-quality fiction.

Lizoanca is a harrowing book written in a refined and nuanced style.

About music and literature: the novel Zavaidoc by Doina Rusti.

The color of sounds and the scurry of words seem to be two of Doina Ruști’s specialties; her Phanariot Manuscript is a dense, spirited, intelligent response to the heavy, opulent, ultimately pretentious sludge from which our Balkanist prose is built… The novel unfolds, polyphonically, in a Fanariot Bucharest sketched with topographical and ethnographic precision in the minutiae of daily life… I have not encountered such attention to the details of everyday existence… The Phanariot Manuscript is, among other things, an analysis of the complicated mechanisms by which this aberrant settlement that is Bucharest functions…

Doina Ruști is a conceptual artist who hides heavy abstractions and arid speculations in the tough flesh of a love story. All starting from a few old words.

L’omino rosso — a substantial novel, mysterious, with an unexpected ending.

In my view, Doina Ruști is a first-rank prose writer of contemporary literature.

(At the Ion Creangă Prize ceremony)

With a graded unfolding of the story, Doina Ruști prolongs pain and dread to unsuspected limits, bringing causes to the surface. She managed to write about that dark—even invisible—part of society, questioning many of its essential elements.

Ruști has the rare ability to capture the hypocrisy of individuals and society, the many forms of violence in their most innocuous guises, and under the slow pace of the narrative they have a constant erosive function. A pictorial and cinematic writing, enabled by a perfect use of comparison. (Turia, 115, 2015)

A wonderfully written story.

Doina Ruști in Libertatea

An important Romanian writer on her father’s murder: “I’m still struggling to write about it.” Read the full piece: “I’m still struggling to write about it.”

Utterly overwhelming is the explosion of original, striking expressions.

Lizoanca la 11 ani — an intense, shocking, and unusual narrative experience, which only a novelist endowed with epic drive and inner strength could deliver.

Full of humor in some sequences, in other tragic and ferocious, sometimes fantastic and luminous, like a Chagall painting, which is predominant in this wonderful story [ "Zogru"] is the figure of the terrible loneliness in which lies the human spirit.

The Phantom is the narrative catalyst that makes secret forces manifest, especially those of a sexual nature, being also the most visible, single faith, dissolved in the last part of the novel (the novel The Ghost in the Mill).

Mâța Vinerii - a stylistic jubilation, a vital literature, such as Suskind's Perfume to a point, and Evgheni Vodolazkin's Laur, from another point on.

Raluca Andreescu, The Ghost of Communism Past The Birth of Post-Communist Gothic Fiction, Zittaw Press, 2011

The novel Eliza a los once años by Doina Ruști has exceptional literary qualities

Doina Ruști convierte su novela en una furiosa causa general contra la depravación de los valores éticos que han de regir cualquer sociedad desarrollada. Mas alla de su enorme valor documental, esta novela releva las extraordinarias cualidades literarias. (Antonio J. Ubero, La Opinión, 3 01, 2015)

En esta línea, sorprende la capacidad de Doina Rusti a la hora de entrelazar la historia de Eliza (indagación en su personalidad infantil: valor de los zapatos, de los cruasa- nes...) con la historia de quienes la prostituyen (no olvidar las viejas cos- tumbres y tradiciones que sobre ellos revolotean). También sorprende la capacidad a la hora de reflotar, bajo una pátina amable, la hipocresía per- sonal y social o el tema de la violen- cia, impactante esta desde la primera frase, siempre visible en la novela y en permanente función erosiva.

The great novel like Camus's The Plague.

Lizoanca is a groundbreaking book written in a style refined and nuanced.

Even the Smallest Detail of the novel is veridical ...

Maiorca, ravishing in her unique beauty, but also a little sorceress, the perfect disciple of her witch mother, Tranca, hipnotizes Leun with her Gypsy magic, while heraling him of his swollen nose, caused by bad berries, warning him of devilish side-effects. Finally, they are having a romantic night, in Bozăria, a place where impossible love and magic turn possible. After their night together, his supreme drive will be that of making her a dress so special that nobody can afford, a dress made of the finest silk, fromMalta. Maiorca is however promised to a Gypsy slave, the property of the boier Doicescu.

A wonderful story, impeccably written.

Doina Rusti is an excellent prose writer, of great talent and intuition;

As regards the literary value of the novel Lizoanca at the age of eleven, I think it is one of the most outstanding in current literature. The narrative intelligence, the fluidity of action, the invariably astonishing eloquence of the text, the shortness, the characters'pithiness, the accuracy of gestures, highly defining within a scene (approached shortly and directly, no introductions, sometimes hardly drafted auctorial reflections) and the way each short chapter enters into the whole - are hall-marks of a great novelist.

In my opinion, the confidence, the artistry of portrayal, the exact and original description of the environment, the quest for a subtle epic crescendo, the illusion of stagnation make Doina Ruști a first class prose writer in current literature.’

... I do not have much time for reading ... but it was enough to open one and I could not close it until I read it through. The other book struck me down, too. Doina Ruști is an excellent prose writer, of great talent and intuition.

The product of a powerful original prose writer, a rara avis in post communist Romanian literature, The Ghost in the Mill is not only a first-rate literary event of the current year, but also one of the most convincingly poignant works of fiction addressing the topic of local communism to be published during the last decade.

The Ghost in the Mill is an imaginative novel, in line with autobiographical fiction, in which magic realism and daily realism intertwine. [...] This mill, which is an axis mundi, the center, the hearth and the obsession of the village, where the character has no clue if he has met the angel or the devil,  this mill is the place where a murder occurs, as at the dawn of all worlds: a certain Max, an epileptic, is killed by mistake [...] and everybody is obliged to keep silent, thus becoming accomplices in the murder.  We have all been accomplices in what has defined and punished us. This is the parable of communism. A novel with substance, a sinewy prose which, I repeat, equals a part or several parts of Cărtărescu’s Orbitor”. 

Doina Ruști has the vocation of a builder constructor, the capacity to build a meaningful narrative and exuberant imagination. If asked to recommend certain characters, pages or sequences from the second part of The Ghost in the Mill, I wouldn’t know which to mention first, because almost all of them are remarkable.

• The Ghost in the Mill* is, from my point of view, the best novel published last year.

The characters drawn by Doina Rusti are incredibly genuine: the author has the rare gift of seeing things both in a synthetical and a contingent way, including detail within the portrait. The core of the novel is the second part: The Mill, being slightly over 200 pages and exceptional. It is this time-space condensed sequence that reveals the great qualities of the author; these are the narrative construction and the capacity to suggest the texture (substance) of a certain humanity.

The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary Cinematic Monsters (Routledge, New York)

„Romanian author Doina Ruști’s novel The Ghost in the Mill (2008) exploits the device of haunting to revisit her nation’s recent history, including the effects of the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine, in 1986”

Romanian author Doina Ruști’s novel The Ghost in the Mill (2008), writer Manuel Rivas, The Crpenten’s Pencil (1998) in wich the ghost of an artist executed by Falangist militia haunts a pencil (and its future user).

Her talent does not necessarily stand for her ability to build phrases, but characters and situations which are not only convincing, but also give you the sentiment of contingency.

The theme of communism suits very well with such a gifted writer, the demoniacal history of the terrible 45 years that Romania has undergone in the isolated space of a village.

Doina Rusti joins the elite of our still youthful prose writers with her third novel, both ambitious and masterful. (...)

The whole construction is remarkable: the epic matter, both dense and fluid, typologically diversified and symbolically rearticulated; the varying rhythm, alert or slow, of the narrative; the clever assemblage and great control. And above everything, an obvious artistic maturity.

The Ghost in the Mill is, without any doubt, one of the landmarks of Romanian contemporary prose, because of the technical clearness of the writing which simulates innocence, the morbid-exuberant imagination and, last but not least, the convincing manner in which it revisits the totalitarian period, with tender detachment, obsession for details and understanding.

The novel Zogru is filled with an atrocious realism, showing a vision as veridical as possible strictly of contemporary reality, but it escapes in the fantastic in a way as natural as Marquez’s famous Remedios was rising to the sky while she was hanging the laundry to dry." (Horia Garbea in Saptamana financiara Journal, March 27th, 2006).

  "The fabulous, the miraculous, the supernatural blend with the petty history, in detail, even in the day-to-day life. A substantial and gripping novel, an altogether unwonted presence on the current literary stage.

"The protagonist The Ghost in the mill is indeed a scepter, hidden in a ruined mill, a topos of horror, but an obsessive attraction for people of Comosteni-village. In several hundred pages, the novel exposes the story of a family and many individual micro-narrations. The characters are transformed in kafkian style under the influence of totalitarian system, so that the final section, entitled Two days, is a delta for all wild rivers of life with the flavor of burnt rubber.”

The Ghost of Communism Past The Birth of Post-Communist Gothic Fiction, Zittaw Press, 2011

"Writing The Ghost in the Mill in order to exorcise the haunting spectre of communist times, Doina Ruști marks an interesting break with the Romanian literary tradition. In tune with international trends, she follows the pattern of ghost stories to reactivate a dreadful past that would not be stifled or silenced. Through the intrusion of unexplainable spectres in the life of a rural community under dictatorial rule and through the central image of a threatening and luring old mill, Ruști manages to create a Gothic novel born out of a history of fear, secrets, betrayal, guilt and broken ties. In so doing, she moves beyond the magic realism to which many writers resorted in the late communist and early post-communist period in an attempt to escape the levelling pressure of socialist realism and the censorship that came along with it. Although her use of Gothic themes and motifs represents a deviation from both old and new Romanian literary norms, which have never really accommodated the genre, the negotiation of the collective past with the tools provided by the Gothic ultimately proved successful, bringing the author high critical acclaim and international recognition. Ruști capitalizes on the genre’s interest in individual trauma and unrest, in the shattered autonomy of the individual, in the loss of coherence, wholeness and in fragmented consciousnesses, in failed relationships, oppression and suffocating anxiety. She deftly adapts the seemingly unlikely Gothic toolbox to Romanian social realities before December 1989, making the most of the genre’s tried and tested disquieting, disruptive potential"

Doina Ruști is the same prose writer of driving force, of a misleading volubility able to drag out ambiguous effects from the most low-pitched prosaism.’ (Gabriel Coșoveanu, România literară, 8 iulie, 2011)

In her novels, Doina Rusti creates scenarios and psychologies that unreel like the windows of a hypertext.’ .

Doina Ruști is a writer who always breaks out from reality restraint, in order to flow, like Aladin, on the enchanted carpet of imagination. Her prose provides all reasons to get confused, and a superficial reader stands the risk to remain prisoner or disenchanted at the sensational level of the topic. This seems to be the case with the recent novel, For men plus Aurelius (Polirom Publishing House, Iași, 2011), a story with literary fast-food ingredients: into a thriller, characters with no psychological depth, an alert simplicity of the narration.

This is a book that I would recommend to those who enjoy literary fiction that does not keep rigidly to a timeline and who could cope with the magical realism aspects of the narrative. Whilst this may not be a novel for everyone, I enjoyed it and am glad that I read it.

The translation here is extremely well-done, but it’s the story that shines with a beautiful use of language, a fascinating plot, and characters who are by turns terrible, silly, and enchanting people. Patca and Caterina are especially wonderful, although Cuviosu and Maxima piqued my curiosity as well.

Ruști creates a Bucharest that is enthralling and captivating as she blurs the lines between fantasy and historical fiction. With Patca as guide, the city’s whimsical warrens and mystical machinations provide fantastical fodder for its people. Sure, the curiously fluid timeline of The Book of Perilous Dishes can lead to misdirection and misunderstanding, but that might be the point. If nothing is ever as it seems, then you must respect every possible detail, no matter now fleeting. Cooking can be a lot like writing: it tells you about the environment you’re in through the details of a recipe or story, especially when you engage in the delicate art of stylistic fusion.

Ruști’s writing excels in her descriptions of food, surroundings, clothes, appearances, and more. It’s extremely tactile: you can sense the environment and actions, from feeling the swirls of cloth and tasting the dishes to following the action as it flows throughout the streets, markets, and homes of Bucharest. Ruști also imbues Patca with a precocious fusion of childlike wonder and world-weary mysticism. Our main character has been forced to mature a bit quickly, but she still retains an innocence about the machinations of the grownups in her world.

Ruști, Doina. Critical Bibliography and Studies on the Works of Doina Ruști.