Doina
Ruști

The recent novel Ferenike by Doina Ruști has already gathered many reviews and online comments. I’ve collected here a few reading impressions, especially since I myself have recently written about the novel.

Reality and the fantastic subtly interweave in Ferenike, in an intimate exploration. Memory, destiny, loss… The mind fills in details and reconstructs, through literature, the places and the world of that time.

Below I’ve noted opinions signed by: Lidia Bodea, Roxana Dumitrache, Ileana Marin, Genoveva Cerchez, Tatiana Niculescu, Adrian Lesenciuc, Adriana Irimescu, Petre Nechita, etc.

Lively, flowing (like the river in the book, on whose bank Doina Ruști builds her own Macondo, a place where nobody is allowed to look at a clock), the story in Ferenike wins you over through color and ingenuity. The happenings and places, the house and the mill, the well, the things (no matter how big or small), the earth, the water—though they seem to have a single autobiographical correspondent fixed in reality—open toward symbol and (at times) the fantastic. And the characters, with names ranging from picturesque to strange, are a gallery of canvases painted front and back—reality and fiction. In their midst, looking at them with the eyes of then and now, is a little girl who wears dresses whose hems are embroidered with all the names she would have liked instead of the one she was given.

“Ferenike reconfirms Doina Ruști’s infallible storyteller’s instinct. A formidable, cinematic prose with mythological resonances, in which scenes unfold before our eyes, and a few even run in a loop, continuously, obsessively, as a memento of the sufferings of the past world—seen not with detachment but with complete clarity, without gaps.”

And because I’ve just read Ferenike, Doina Ruști’s most recent novel, I will conclude by saying that even her name, more than a pseudonym—indeed an official change—has opened the way to a painful construction—memory by memory, novel by novel—of an experience that demands to be shared. In dialogue with Ferenike, the ancient trainer of her own athletic sons, who as a woman was forbidden access to the stadium, Doina Ruști becomes a Pythia who sees the well-hidden truth of the typology of eternal puppeteers, who change their ideology and mask but never their nature. Like Ferenike who “gave up identity, gave up her name,” the pre-Ruști Doina decided to follow the same courageous path. Renouncing both identity and name, she refines the weave of Romanian prose, combining it with memoir and self-reflective writing to inscribe her family’s story and that of the people of Comoșteni into a chapter of social history. She makes of autobiographical fiction a Ferenike of history, and of the specific—alert, tense, rhizomatic—writing with perfectly calibrated multiple plots, a Ferenike for her true self.

Doina Ruști’s autobiographical novel grips and envelops you from the first to the last line in a game of affective memory you can’t—and don’t want to—escape. The 1960s, in a village on the banks of the Jiu, unfold in a captivating, unexpected, fluid family architecture, with a delightful naturalness. You enter what the author calls the “labyrinth of narration” with the appetite for reading that a family saga awakens and keeps alive through the richness of words and life situations caught at a historic tipping point. Houses, yards, rooms, wardrobes, tin boxes, doors, staircases, fig and apricot trees breathe in the rhythm of carefully hidden emotions. If there were (and there probably is) an equivalent of chiromancy or coffee-cup fortune-telling based on reading in eyes, the narrator would be a formidable seer of gazes, an expert in “ophthalmomancy,” in the divination of sight. The characters’ eyes and their gaze upon the world compose the universe of memory, in which a naturally inquisitive little girl gradually discovers her vocation as a storyteller and her destiny as a talented writer. Wonderful literature that flows like life itself, without artifices and without fussy stylistic frippery!

I’m thinking that I’ve finished Ferenike and I burst into tears. And that I would like all books to be like this. To jumble your thoughts and tidy you up inside. Doina Ruști beats García Márquez hollow. In my opinion.

And for the dimwits who believe in Prince Charmings on white horses—read the book. Maybe you’ll figure out how it was with the Golden Age. Maybe.

As the book’s editor, I had the privilege of reading the manuscript. It’s a tender and raw book, about a world that falls apart and another that insinuates itself like a weed, all under the eyes of a storyteller who keeps receiving a different name. A book you can’t help but love.

I finished this autobiographical novel by Ms. Doina Ruști last night, and I can say my thoughts will linger for a long time on Comoșteni, on Mițulica, and on all the people sketched in Márquez-like colors.

At the beginning, I got tangled in names and pseudonyms, wondering why the grandmother isn’t “grandmother,” the mother isn’t “mother,” and the father isn’t “father.” Well, this became one of my favorite things as I read on. The characters are stripped of the stereotypes they might represent; each lives their story in a way that makes us see them in all their complexity, with all their shades.

I felt the nostalgia and longing between the pages, I saw the beauty encapsulated in memories, I sensed the whiff of fairytale that only the past can lay over a story, but I also experienced the dream turning into nightmare through the communist experience. The third part of the book brought an incredible shift: what seemed like a living Macondo became a world stained by militiamen, “decree children,” and dread. I finished the book with a lump in my throat.

The descriptions were delicious. The Jiu with its fairies, the bustling house, the mill with its secrets, and the tousle-haired little girl—witness to the dynamics of an entire community. I loved the writing, the characters, all the adventures; I adored the warm and colorful atmosphere of Comoșteni and I felt the harshness of the socialist wind.

I would have liked the story to continue, to meet Doina the adult and hear her stories and adventures.

A wonderful book—I recommend it with all my heart!

Ferenike (fere-nike, bearer of victory), a character from Pindar’s odes, appears in a dream and forces the little girl to choose between her two parents, the one who will survive and the one who will die, refusal leading automatically to the death of both. The scene reminded me of Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2017 film The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which reclaims the tragic mechanism of punishing hubris by sacrificing a family member—so well illustrated by Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis—a solution dictated by invisible yet no less terrible gods. The father is the one sacrificed, killed by a militiaman named Smeu, which evokes local folklore, in what appears to be a regime-ordered murder, pushing responsibility up into the higher strata of the party hierarchy against the background of arms deals between communist Romania and Vietnam at war with the United States. Doina Ruști is deft enough to render the conspiratorial scenario ambiguous to the point of discredit, tracing the deep filiation of the crime and maintaining the suspense of an excellent political thriller with a striking finale. The appearance of this personal-use divinity, the sibyl, institutes a dimension of transcendence, giving the novel the resonance chamber of a profound reflection on the relationship between individual, family, and history, reconnecting it to mystery, to the ineffable.

By employing, through the character that ensures metaleptic transgression, a development that carries in itself the seeds of a remythologization (in the opposite sense of what James Joyce or John Updike achieved), there might have been the risk—if we listen to Genette—that verisimilitude be flouted. Doina Ruști’s mastery allows her to build at the boundary between worlds—between narrating and narrated, reality and dream, memory and reality—a smooth passage without defying verisimilitude, which allows metalepsis, as transgression, to occur also at the level of reading (Genette himself imagined the metalepsis of reading). This is probably why the novel’s effect on its readers is so powerful.

Beyond this remarkable narrative innovation, the novel attracts through the sincerity of its narration. We are thrown—by a presence from beyond the threshold—into a space that shapes itself as a comprehensive domestic universe, and somewhat self-sufficient, until the moment it becomes contaminated by exteriority.

Ferenike opens as the promise of escape from corrosive reality and, together with the strong aromas of that forgotten, dissolving world, it seizes the reader and keeps them captive in the mists of their own guilt, which they roll along with the protagonist, right to the core of the soul left unprotected—raw, sincere, and frighteningly contagious.

I’d now refer to a book that can be placed on the same shelf as Ferenike: The Years by Annie Ernaux. In the case of the author distinguished with the Nobel Prize for Literature, the autobiographical novel is the external history projected onto a family’s life, while Ferenike is a family’s life projected from the inside toward history that cuts into living flesh.

Historical reality is an extremely important framework in Ferenike, but not as a textbook lesson. The Vietnam War, the visit of U.S. President Richard Nixon, the Vietnamese who came to Comoșteni, the death of Dej, Ceaușescu the man of the people and Ceaușescu the frightening one, the political decisions taken in Bucharest—all make themselves felt in the microcosm of Comoșteni, “Doina Ruști’s own Macondo,” as Lidia Bodea calls it; thus history is a framework, a shaping backdrop, but not the main character.

Back to Ernaux’s The Years, a book told in one breath, a novel where style is not what matters but the account. But Doina Ruști goes beyond that threshold: she recounts, yet in Ferenike she preserves her unmatched style—she is still the storyteller who gathers tales from the Phanariot era, the pains of The Ghost in the Mill, Flori’s passion from Occult Beds; she keeps that realistic-fantastic fairytale tone even when she turns her memories into literature. How to describe Doina Ruști’s style? It’s the capacity to shake words free of their banal meanings. Look for the perfume of rivers in Ferenike, the vitality in Zavaidoc, the “happiness of being only a rag pressed to a stranger’s wound” in The Phanariot Manuscript, or the hint of quince jam that floats through Homeric, foreshadowing a life taken. In fact, open to any page and you’ll see that adjectives are not the hallmark of this style, but the vocabulary as a whole—the words that have the right verb (that is, their own movement, their life), like “wet cats” that shake off the water and immediately shine and purr in the breath of the story.

The ending is an open one. The last dozens of pages can be read as a crime novel—I found that too in Ferenike. And the final period in the book (I would have put an exclamation mark; I would have shouted this ending—but it’s good that Doina Ruști doesn’t reach for clichés and cheap tricks) opens the horizon of the other novels. Ferenike leaves room on the shelf—spaces that call to be filled by other novels, not a simple sequel, but by a placing of personal and general history onto the page.

After reading Ferenike, I feel I can state: memory is the territory of true literature. Whatever you write—be it SF or psychological realism—you must first turn to yourself. Still, you must ask yourself: do you have a story to tell? Do you really have something to say after shaking off the weeds and dust into which banal, everyday events, nerves, stress, and random grimaces have turned? Because the story is what matters most. Doina Ruști demonstrates this in every novel, in every short story, in every opinion piece in the magazine Ficțiunea, in any interview she gives. Listen to what she says, read what she writes, and you won’t find the bricks of self-sufficiency and pride conspiring to erect her own statue. The literary myth, the legend, builds itself without the writer’s intervention, independent of their vanity and hopes. And we can be proud to witness such a moment—the emergence of classic literature—so I am not ashamed to place Doina Ruști’s novels above those of some Nobel authors!

For the reader, after the first pages, the fact that the text is autobiographical becomes irrelevant. It’s not the authenticity of facts that ensures value, but their transfiguration—because a great writer can make literature out of anything.

Written with a master’s hand, the novel is an admirable artistic construction that raises Doina Ruști’s talent to an even higher level: a unique and already recognizable world is created from the magical realm of the Comoșteni, from the family’s fabulous house, from its anthology-worthy members, while the author’s search for identity will reach a “time regained.” Everything that seemed lost is regained through literature.

The world created here—the village of Comoșteni, a small universe and yet so complex—has everything: magical realism, a story about a past that never allows us to detach fully from it, Oltenia in the ’60s, the childhood of many of us resurrected—especially if we lived first-hand the dust, sun, summer storms, and family dramas. Every page of the book overflows with details (thousands and thousands—colors, clothes, houses, living people, dead people) of a world that has vanished, but not entirely; of a world good, but not entirely; of a world harsh and relentless, but not entirely. All lines with a personal, memory-laden tenor intertwine with details from the history of the time—communism, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, militiamen. Therefore this volume is not only an act of fiction but also a solid document of those times.
[The book portion. Doina Ruști’s story worlds]

It’s no accident that the novel Ferenike can be overwhelming, misunderstood, atypical; that it may be classified as a magical narrative, an imagined life of a child who lived at the crossroads of remarkable family and sociopolitical histories. What is remarkable is the capacity to reveal—with all the pains, nostalgias, and joys—these times. Ferenike is a source-autobiography, because “every spring has its own fragrance; you can sense it as with people. There are rivers suffocated, that flow heavily, and there are others which, no matter how much filth has been thrown into them, keep the breath of their source.” I felt the people and places in this novel, because Doina Ruști knows that the gift of storytelling can heal and can leave its DNA to those who are or will be.

The village of Comoșteni, “part of a Brâncoveanu estate, once a princess’s dowry,” given to the locals after she became a nun, transcends the boundaries of a mere geographical space, taking on a symbolic dimension within themes of destiny, loss, inheritance, and identity—akin to other memorable spaces in world literature: Macondo (One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel García Márquez), Yoknapatawpha (William Faulkner), or even the land of dense forests and dark waters in southern France where generations of the Peniel family live at the border between the real, the fantastic, and fate (The Book of Nights—Sylvie Germain).

Ferenike is more than a story about childhood; it is a meditation on memory, identity, and the way we are shaped not only by the past and our family history but also by the consequences of events that change destinies and even national history. It is also a book about death. But beyond themes, Doina Ruști offers us a profound novel, a captivating, stirring story, with memorable characters and vivid descriptions—sometimes oneiric, sometimes harsh—creating a fascinating contrast. Ferenike is not just a novel to be read; it’s a story that prints itself on your soul and that you carry with you forever.

Ferenike intervenes in a dream/nightmare, threatening an impossible choice. A choice resembling a crime. Only one of the parents—the one the little girl is to choose—will be allowed to cross beyond the threshold of the fateful year 1968. Apparently, the victim will be Muc (“I had killed Muc and there was no one to hold to account”). Ferenike—who appeared periodically, sometimes from a tarry haze, yet always tall, victorious—understood, willed, and acted otherwise. A death by violence, with political implications.

This makes Ferenike not only an autobiographical, cinematic novel but also a political one—highly topical.

Doina Ruști’s new book, “Ferenike” (Humanitas, 2025), is an autobiographical novel written with such credibility and authenticity.

The ending is by Arriaga—cinematic, as is the whole book, in fact.

The attachment to truth—hers and that of those around her—gives rise to an authentic novel, a fine perception, a surgical cut perfectly executed with the scalpel of the writer’s innate storytelling talent, through the layers of personal history, of the lives of those around her and, not least, through the layers of Romania’s history from the ’50s to the ’80s, capturing with acuity and nostalgia the dissolution of the interwar world full of beauty and magic and the interpenetration of its last remnants with the world of communism, which makes its way into the village on the Jiu through the stridency of propaganda shouted over newly mounted street loudspeakers and through the physical and psychological violence that people live and perceive differently, yet always at maximum intensity.

With a brisk and easy-to-follow style, yet never simplistic, the novel effortlessly involves the reader in the life stories of its characters, the family’s life—including the extended family—and the life of the community, so that the sensation is of being transported into the story. Thus it creates in the reader the desire to actually visit the place where the events of the novel occur—to try to live personally, in reality, the atmosphere described in the book, to step into the life unfolding in that historical period in Comoșteni, to linger a little in the peace-and-nostalgia-laden atmosphere of the “big house”:

With a sure hand and an unfailing sense of detail, Doina Ruști sketches a fabulous world in which historical events—the establishment of communism, the moon landing, or Ceaușescu’s rise to power—blend with magical elements, which we also encounter in the author’s other books.

The Comoșteni of her childhood is a variegated and violent world, where ancient myths and supernatural beings coexist in a universe in which communism presses upon lives—even when people are happy.

Much has been written about the magical realism in Doina Ruști’s work and about García Márquez’s echoes in her writing. But I believe the magical air in Ferenike is rather a blend of Eliade and Ismail Kadare, the one from Broken April.

Ferenike is, without having aimed to be, a feminist manifesto.

It’s no surprise that the book’s most powerful character is a woman—Mițulica. A vestige of a bygone era in which her family had been a local pillar, Mițulica continues to run not only the household but the entire area. People call her “the Lady” (at a time when the title could cause trouble), respect her, and fear her.

She is also the protagonist of the novel’s most unsettling scene, which seems cut out of an ancient tragedy. It is the moment when her son is killed and she confronts the militiaman who oversaw his assassination.

“In front of the mill there were many people, and in their midst the flustered militiaman Smeu was trying to explain something. Mițulica was smearing him with mud from the ditches. The militiaman’s coat looked like a doormat someone had wiped their boots on. (…) Catching sight of me, Mițulica pointed a finger at Smeu—this wretch, she said, sobbing—look at him well, don’t forget him.”

Doina Ruști’s writing has a strong visual impact—almost cinematic. Words are used to create powerful images that linger in the reader’s memory. Details, aromas, and objects are all presented meticulously to create the most plausible setting, over which the supernatural elements are laid.

The narrative rhythm is interestingly dosed, too. If at first we have the feeling of a world where time is patient and places and people are described in lavish detail, as we move forward the rhythm accelerates, so that the ending is almost a shock.

Ferenike is a peak work—first-person and of the feminine genre. Far from making the mistake of a mimetic adaptation of a masculine perspective—still central in the Romanian literary mainstream—Doina Ruști projects a memorable character.

The novel is terraced. On the one hand, the existential matter is seen from the inside, from very close, with all the characters’ adherences. This life of a little girl from deep Oltenia is broken down into edifying episodes and scenes and is relived through the act of writing with extraordinary authenticity.

Ferenike, Doina Ruști’s autobiographical novel, is and will remain a benchmark work of the literature of the post-1989 era.

DCNews, Daniela Cristea Enache, Flaviu Predescu

Ferenike—Humanitas, 2025—is the book of the fall from paradise and, at the same time, of the formation of a personality following the confrontation with her family’s history. It is the coming-of-age of a girl who sees the world as a spectacle, but realizes not only that she is an actor, not a spectator, but also a victim of it. Presented by the author as autobiography and bearing fictional features, this volume truly offers details from Doina Ruști’s life—from her early years up to the summer when the event that will change the course of the entire family’s existence occurs.

The reason for this whole interweaving of details and stories is that, beyond the subjects the writer tackles, there is in fact only one: her own. And this novel gathers and distills the world of the Comoșteni and the tragedy that happened there—her father’s assassination.

What fascinates most in Doina Ruști’s prose—beyond the factual content—is the permanent and open communication with the reader, who is considered more than just the recipient of the literary act; rather, a witness to the events and a recognized partner of the author in generating the literary act.

Ferenike is a dense novel, impeccably controlled, with enchanting stories and captivating characters. As Lidia Bodea writes on the back cover, it seems autobiographical but “everything opens toward symbol and (at times) the fantastic.”

Doina Ruști’s greatest writerly virtue is that she is a great storyteller. With every character, the story moves forward, and Comoșteni seems a fabulous place where only interesting and terrible things happened. Muțulică, Muc, Gică, Cornel, Tavică, and the others are all characters brimming with life—in the sense that wherever they are, something must happen; you cannot pass them by; you cannot avert your eyes. The Jiu “demands a human head” when it roars: even the river is alive, unforgettable.

And the one who tells the tale seems to have been a very precocious child. The novel, structurally in three parts—Main Streets, Houses and People, and Ferenike—is told by a narrator who recounts her life up to 1968, when she was 11, with rare but meaningful steps beyond that age.

But the whole novel is full of substance. “I moved on; the sky was lowering toward the Jiu, and on the right the mill was moving, which seemed alive to me, made of monsters and ghosts. I walked barefoot on knotgrass and thought about the slippers forgotten in the kiosk or on the stairs. I looked at my yellow dress, the hem embroidered with flowers. And, lowering my gaze, I saw a shining heap, a little mound the size of my fist, made of tiny lacquered seeds. It was fascinating; I had never seen such a beautiful little pile, set artfully between two branches of knotgrass. No one was there; there was no sack from which they could have spilled. How those seeds got there remained a mystery. They were small and shiny, and I felt irresistibly drawn to them. They seemed perfect, descended from the sky. I wanted to see what they were, who they were.” (p. 74.) This is the very secret of this marvelous writing: intense, deep, authentic curiosity. The child whose memories are gathered here was precocious—and yet a true child, full of life and hungry for adventure.

Comoșteni, called by the same Lidia Bodea “Doina Ruști’s own Macondo,” is itself an enchanted place. People live full of imagination and fantasy, and death seeks them out in strange, stirring ways—by drowning or even a bloody beating. Communism is presented as something terrible, yet through the imagination that belongs not so much to the narrator as to the narration itself, it also bears Hrabal-like accents. The terrible is part of the story too: the story cannot be controlled.

The writing, however, can be. I say this with the greatest admiration: craftsmanship, the science of sentences, is as important as talent and inspiration. Those sentences ending a subchapter and making us always curious, making us wait for what’s next; those events that always feel natural—never contrived—these are the clear traits of a book wrought with a fine pen. Naturalness whose price only another writer knows and in what meticulous workshop it is born: that’s what attracts the writer turned reader.

I would have read more; the ending seemed a bit abrupt, but I hope that’s just because the novel will continue. Doina Ruști often alludes to her earlier novels written also from childhood experience: perhaps Ferenike hides the new books I eagerly await.

I will not write a review of Doina Ruști’s most recent novel. I don’t have the composure to do it after reading the author’s confession; her story still keeps me there, in that Márquez-like world, as if hung from the sky head down. There are others more skilled who can do it—or already have. I only want to draw attention to one perspective, as I perceived it at the end of this reading.

Ferenike is an autobiographical novel which, once opened, carries you into the world transfigured in the book. From a mere reader, you become a witness to what happens in Comoșteni, in a time when the weather did not serve humankind. You see the big red-brick mill and shiver. You watch the films prepared by Ionel the projectionist. You go to school with Gică and Mițulica. You take part in everything. You share in the good and the bad. And when you are tired, you just go down to the Jiu and everything is resolved. Ferenike is more than a novel; it is a portal, a door that teleports you to another world—that of a childhood that does not cease to be and remain the age of gold of the self, despite a totalitarian reality. A world in which everything opens toward symbol and, at times, toward the fantastic; in this space unfolds the process of self-discovery and the shaping of the author’s identity. Nothing is accidental in this book; every detail, from the largest object to the most insignificant, has a role.

At the center of the story is a little girl who wears dresses whose hems bear all the names she would have liked instead of the one she received. Before her unfold tragic events—happenings that, for a child, are not easy to understand or accept. The little girl is friendly with everyone and is related—emotionally, not just by birth—to Tavică, the adolescent uncle who will never have time to grow old. Her life changes after an unforeseen event, followed by others. In the end, the little girl meets Ferenike in a not-so-pleasant dream. She has a decision to make that will change her life.

The symbolic title Ferenike updates the story of a woman from ancient Greece—an athlete at a time when only men were allowed to participate in the Olympic Games. Even so, Ferenike found a solution by disguising herself as a man and as her son’s “trainer.” Eventually her secret was revealed, and after that all the trainers were required to enter competitions naked to confirm their true identity. Ferenike is, as in this novel, a symbol of the courage to change things that seem impossible to change and of achieving the most distant dreams—even if you are born or live in the most disadvantaged circumstances and fate seems against you. Perhaps for this very reason, Ferenike is in Doina Ruști’s novel an “alter ego” of the writer herself.

I liked very much, in this novel, the themes addressed: identity, memory, love, and also the relationship between past and present; one of the fundamental themes is the search for a balance between personal freedom and the constraints imposed by history. I can say that, from the first chapter, I was fascinated and couldn’t put it down; when I finished, I suffered because it ended so quickly and imperceptibly. I appreciated the way the author crafted the story. On a first reading, it gives you the impression that the ending is predictable, but in the end you realize you were wrong. You get annoyed, sometimes you cry, other times you laugh or smile, and at times you feel yourself sinking deeper into the conflicts, eager to see the connection between all the things you know. I must underline the perfect writing—Doina Ruști makes it very easy for you to identify, in turn, with each character, to empathize, sympathize, or be horrified, as the case may be.

The only flaw I find in the novel is that it’s addictive!

I recommend Ferenike to any reader, regardless of age. It deserves to be bought and read, to convince yourself that this is indeed the case. Such a book finds its place not only in every reader’s library but also in every person’s soul.

Reality and the fantastic subtly interweave in Doina Ruști’s novel, in an intimate exploration. Memory, destiny, loss… The mind fills in details and reconstructs, through literature, the places and the world of that time.

Doina Ruști always knows how to bewitch her readers with an impeccable narrative thread, built by intersecting realist discourse with plunges into the fantastic and oneiric, reinventing again and again a biography sustained by a fabulous memory.

Objects (a bottle of sour-cherry liqueur, a painting, a bicycle, the “ramp”—the unavoidable “ramp” at the childhood home’s door, part of a family apotropaic ritual, a kind of shield, a lock against the intrusion of evil from outside—actually insurmountable, only postponed), the light (“At the Ghosts there wasn’t a normal light, but one charged with ethereal beings, with rustles or words said under the breath”) become parts of an “architecture of my intimity,” metonymies of identity and destiny subject to a persistent agglutination process which reminded me of the same device used on a large scale by Radu Petrescu in his novels and journals. Yet the account is not white, neutral, but electrified outright by the thrill of this child’s consciousness through which the collapse of a world and of an era is refracted (“a world that was dying, whose disappearance I witnessed”). It is not about an identity void, an anonymization of the narrator, because the outer world she spotlights is, in fact, the spiritual matter that builds her. […]

The style doesn’t slide toward parody or self-mockery. The image of the village and the family remains fairly sober, traversed by a wave of melancholy that brings it, from this perspective, closer to Marin Preda. At once sunlit and dark, with a culture of dialogue, sociability, and story—in whose atmosphere the author has the privilege of growing—the world of childhood and adolescence remains a stimulating environment whose future seismic events, whose tragic nature (I wouldn’t say traumatizing; rather, marking, with an echo) are all crammed into Ferenike’s fist “thrust down the throat to the guts.”

The decrepitude into which the new life in Filiași plunges Cornel and Muc is perhaps more harrowing than the tragic events recounted in the novel’s final part. These are pages without useless dramatizations, but hard through the raw suffering they exude—pages that reminded me of that true bazaar of decadence constructed by Bruno Schulz in Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. In her own way, Muc also builds, like Schulz’s Jakub, a “bird empire” through her dissections of “porumbaci”—a new passion that exasperates Mițulica. Just as the narrator in Cinnamon Shops becomes a frenetic supporter of the father in whom he sees a sad hero of illusions and of the book, Doina Ruști clearly has a particular attachment to Cornel—the paternal figure who inspires her and who must be placed within the literary family of fathers with a key role in their children’s cultural becoming. […]

Could Comoșteni have been a place on the map of Romanian literary geography without Doina Ruști? Surely not. Could Doina Ruști be the writer we know without Comoșteni and without the luminous, though tragic, figures who trained her discipline of looking and her desire to understand? Hard to say. But it is certain that the pleasure of reading and the joy of storytelling were formed here—with Tavică’s spirit “hovering everywhere,” with the first books, with the much-coveted Michael, Brother of Jerry by Jack London, with the films “projected” by the projectionist, with that apricot tree that “ratified my bond with reading” and that endures, Proust-like, associated with all the books read in the garden “on a divan improvised by Muc.” Comoșteni rewarded the narrator’s empathy and discretion with the most substantial presence—literary presence—which can never be “ground to dust,” and protected the adolescent, and later the mature writer, from the disease of egocentrism and cheap sensationalism. For under the cold, metallic chill of the fatality named Ferenike, there is no time for fripperies or spiritual hypochondria. The heroine learns the painful lesson of acceptance and transforms it, through writing, into a pedagogy of attentive seeing—the supreme expression of giving. And hell remains, always, elsewhere.

With Ferenike, Doina Ruști achieves a tour de force. She pays homage to her family, to the universe in which she searched for much broader frescoes and…

Again, a dual construction has formed. And she does it with delicacy…

Not by retelling, but by giving it new life—between the covers of a book.

Doina Ruști had nothing to prove, but Ferenike raises the bar very high and imposes itself among the memorable releases of the year.

What is interesting is that, regardless of the age to which she returns, I feel the same precision in the narrator’s recounting of facts—the same precision I’ve encountered in her other novels. Calm yet piercing, lucid, focused, an observer who misses nothing. This is little Doina Ruști—the same little girl who tells Santa that what she wants most of all in the world is never to have children. A confession that turns into a veritable threat against communist society. The little girl who, once grown, divorces because she keeps the same convictions. A child of an acute intelligence, surrounded by family and yet so alone—who loses her father and calls herself, with a kind of painful detachment, the dead man’s child. The same little girl wears coats in interwar fashion, for which teachers humiliate her, and dresses sewn with all the names she never had.

I wondered what it must be like to carry so much history on your back. How much weight can a single name place upon you? When I left the territory—the author says, referring to the moment she broke away from Comoșteni—not feeling nostalgia for a lost childhood but rather an exit from a magical space. For me, the world of childhood loses its physical representation. It is a space that exists independently. A state within a state, where even time seems to flow according to its own rules, yet which does not escape history’s horrors and the oppression of political regimes.

Whatever I do, I cannot stop the howl, erase it, hide it even, because I am the eyes stuck to the window; I am the patient destined to endure; I am the dead man’s daughter from Comoșteni.

I liked how I felt as if in a play where people are only the backdrop upon which the protagonist’s drama is performed. I liked the Jiu, the well, the mill, the Ghosts’ room—all these places full of meaning and symbolism. I liked how much names matter in the author’s life. She addresses her parents and grandparents by their names or invented names. The grandmother is Mițulica. The father is Cornel. The mother is Muc—a being who cannot project onto the little girl the unshakeable authority of a mother. In turn, between the little girl and the father there is a constant play of names. He addresses her by a different name depending on his mood and the moment. It’s no wonder that at a certain point the narrator rejects the name given at baptism and longs for the freedom to choose her own name. A sublime request for independence.

Ferenike is not simply an autobiographical novel; it is a profound exploration of memory, pain, and femininity, unfolded in a distinctive stylistic register that blends the real with the symbolic and the oneiric. Through the narrator’s voice, the reader makes an initiatory journey into the universe of a childhood marked by trauma yet by an unflagging search for meaning and inner freedom. Original in construction, poetic in language, and unsettling in sincerity, the novel once again confirms Doina Ruști’s talent. Ferenike offers no definitive answers; rather, it invites reflection—reconnection with our own wounds and with the essence of our identity.

Read Ferenike, then The Ghost in the Mill. Ferenike appeared in 2025, and The Ghost in the Mill in 2008. Even so, Doina Ruști is so masterful that she told me approximately the same story, yet awakened new emotions and images each time. I cannot rejoice enough that she decided to write Ferenike, which fixes a moment from The Ghost in the Mill, but fixes it in autobiographical notes, as a bildungsroman, as historical novel, and as social novel—to the point that I’ll never understand why Doina Ruști isn’t already studied in school. On the other hand, The Ghost in the Mill presents the fictionalized story of Doina Ruști’s native Comoșteni, in which Doina Ruști is not Doina Ruști, as she is in Ferenike, and the supernatural and fantastic that she inserted as a vertebral column throughout the story make everything downright magical—magical against a communist backdrop.

With Ferenike she takes the step toward the autobiographical novel, a natural extension/development of the situations and characters from her earlier books. If there the elements inspired by her own life were rather narrative pretexts, here they become the core of an introspective and at the same time therapeutic prose, imbued with the unmistakable style of a (post)modern Scheherazade who carries her readers through a troubled history with the promise of ever more revelations, in a never-ending story. Beyond the engaging succession of events, the memorable episodes, and the deftly maintained suspense, Ferenike is an attempt to come to terms with herself—to soften a burdensome past that follows you. more