Doina
Ruști

Doina Ruști’s recent novel, Nas de bulgar, has gathered opinions, reading impressions, reviews, and comments.

As in Ferenike, here too reality and the fantastic subtly intertwine through a journey that begins in communism and leads toward ancient worlds.

Below I have collected opinions signed by Dan C. Mihăilescu, Roxana Dumitrache, Petre Nechita, Emma Neamțu, as well as from the Ești în cărți book club, run by students at Ferdinand I College in Bacău.

You remembered well, dear lady reader, when you saw the writer’s name on the cover. Yes, this is the same Doina Ruști who delighted you — and us — in The Ghost in the Mill (2008), with her introspective gift for entering the world of childhood, of femininity budding in an innocence outraged by the cruelty of history and the injustice of fate; then with the sensory-fantasmatic lacework of the Phanariot trilogy, composed of Homeric, The Book of Perilous Dishes, and The Phanariot Manuscript; as well as with the raw and endearing delicacy of Lizoanca at the Age of Eleven, or the endearing and sarcastic tone of Mămica la două albăstrele. The writer feels in a Proustian manner, yet describes in a Balzacian one, masterfully cultivating psychological mosaic-work and behavioral color.

And you, dear gentleman reader, will have recognized on the cover the name of the writer who gave us the exuberant Balkanism of Zogru (2006), and the seductive genealogical casebook of Ferenike (Humanitas, 2025), where the mediumistic soul of the ten-year-old girl incorporates the entire family tree, with the Father haloed like a god in a ghostly retrospective, only to end as a sacrificial victim.

Nas de bulgar takes the little girl from Ferenike into high school and university, turns the family chronicle into a campus novel — Dormitory no. 6 of the University of Iași — with Arab students trafficking in everything and serial rapists; it gratefully displays the qualities of teachers such as Adelina Piatkowski and Cicerone Poghirc, outrages us with Securitate harassment, yet also provokes exotic visions through its incursions into illo tempore and the southern Danubian world, including Alexander the Great, Goths, Thracians, Visigoths, and certain Montenegrin Vlach ancestors, knights born with a spear in hand.

A complete spectacle of realism and fantasy, with chimerical loves, vulnerable innocence, and histrionic egocentrism; the village of Comoșteni neighbors García Márquez’s Macondo, while time contracts like the bellows of an accordion. This first diptych of an autofictional tetralogy displays the contents of the drawers from which all the writer’s previous books have emerged, offering us, in the former student’s fascination with Gaston Bachelard’s elemental reveries, the surest key to deciphering her mysteries. With sight in Ferenike and smell in Nas de bulgar, we may wait with trembling anticipation for the next volume, perhaps devoted to hearing as listening.

An enveloping, cinematic, dense saga, in which cruel history intersects with the subjective history of the narrator-protagonist and holds you captive in a kaleidoscopic story about fantastical characters, untamed spirits such as the zuli, myths more or less diffuse, evoking unknown parts of archaic history, mythological proximities, but also major social themes such as the condition of women and of migrants.

After the formidable novel Ferenike, Nas de bulgar continues the archaeology of identity meant to complete an anti-pantheon, a gallery of personal demons — this time with the demon of love in the foreground.

Although symbolically tied to the history of Romanians through its eleven episodes, the love story, evoked with tender humor, intelligent candor, and populated by eclectic literary references, remains self-contained and claims its right to exist.

There is no such thing as a time after history, just as there can be no time after love, because every love is probably meant to place a halo over the world.

Nas de bulgar is about past and nearby worlds, but also about the way love solarizes them.

The novel is a personal history, but from the particular it passes, naturally and without stumbling, into the general, the universal. It is our history, the history of the people south and north of the Danube, the history of blood — one told more clearly than in any school textbook.

Nas de bulgar is a love story, a history of the self, of self-love, but also a novel of the culprit in the shadows and of unheard, ignored victims. A book about migration, about flight and return. The novel represents a personal history that leads us toward the general. After the childhood of Ferenike, in Nas de bulgar we move on to the high-school and university years, in the City of White Skins, during the communist period.

But this personal history is connected to past generations, and thus we descend through time, all the way back to Alexander the Great.

No digressions, no pompous, inflated passages designed to become quotations.

“And in my blood there has always moved a shadowy story, beneath which tribes and families of travelers scatter.”

As in Ferenike, what astonishes is the exactness of memory. Let us be clear: the two novels are not diaries, but they give the impression of having been written at the very moment when the events took place, yet with the dose of wisdom granted by the passage of time. One observation should be added here. Do not look for metaphors in Doina Ruști — not in Ferenike and Nas de bulgar. Do not imagine that when she says I remember that year in detail, it is an exaggeration. Read directly; go to the proper, real core of the expression; do not hunt for horoscope-style interpretations. The City of White Skins is the city of people without features, shaped from a transparent film. Exactly so, nothing more and nothing less.

Obviously, the contemporary part of the personal history was written with retrospectively exploratory intentions, yet it is also read as a document of the era — the 1970s — with all its schizoid manifestations, captured and rendered by the writer in all their absurdity, with humor and acidity, with rebellion, without conformist intentions: the Worm, the teachers, the readings, the studies, the dormitory, the crimes and rapes, the greyness, the exasperation. The swamp in which she refuses to lose herself. The solitude she seeks and protects, a border between herself and the others. Merciless lucidity.

What must be noted is the utterly special nature of the reality in which the protagonist lives. Several times, she observes that the interlocutor of the moment mistakenly takes her words as metaphors or symbols, when in fact, for her, they represent the most objective truth. That is why, in this novel, the ancient stories, from Detustaina to Veliku, from gods to zuli, although composed or reconstructed by the protagonist, are as real as if she had seen them with her own eyes, and they intertwine organically with the rest of her universe. Based on real events, to use a familiar phrase, they are at the same time free enough to form an authentic and deeply personal mythology. They are coordinated by the same deep and lucid knowledge of human nature, of the impulses, emotions, and desires that determine destiny. That is why, moreover, there is no point in separating reality from fiction in the narrator’s account, because for her, everything she tells has happened — to her or to her ancestors — and that is all that matters.

“Love means discovering who you are.”

If, in the writer’s previous universe — the one shaped around the setting of Comoșteni in the novel Ferenike — the “demon of death” reigned sovereign and merciless, in this new narrative world we become fascinated witnesses to the absolute triumph, or perhaps the total enslavement, imposed by the demon of love. This devouring force reconfigures destinies and rewrites the characters’ priorities. The turning point of the entire existential journey, the axis around which the protagonist’s whole evolution revolves, is marked by the hypnotic encounter with “the Model” on Pushkin Alley. This confrontation is not a simple crossing of two gazes, but the disturbing encounter with that “monster that turns you into a slave and from which no one escapes.” Love thus loses its idyllic attributes and takes on the dimensions of a mythical force, an implacable destiny that claims its rights and which, through the spiritual bondage it imposes, paradoxically becomes the only authentic path toward freedom and self-knowledge.

Personal trauma and national myth are explored in depth, presented as two inseparable sides of the same existential coin. In a downright fascinating parallel, the oppressive universe of communism and distant archaic history are depicted as complex systems of control, which nevertheless offer, paradoxically, unexpected paths of spiritual escape. Amid this tangle of constraints, there also appear benevolent figures of authority, such as Professor Badea. Although governed by undeniable academic severity, he knew how to look indulgently “through his eyelashes” and “over his glasses,” guiding with tact the young, rebellious spirit toward a world of ideas he believed to be perfect. Through the rigorous study of Latin and through intellectual discipline, the characters attempt to distill the wanderings specific to youth, hoping to reach the pure essence of their being.

Doina Ruști’s novel reflects a dense literary space, where the aromas of the Danube mingle painfully with the hidden suffering of the aquatic world, and where the winding road toward the self necessarily passes through the “open door” of the other. Nas de bulgar remains a disturbing story about the way we reconstruct our fragmented identity in the mirror of the beloved, all unfolding under the discreet patronage of ancient gods and of a great history that never releases us from its grip.

See also Critical Reception

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