Doina
Ruști

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"

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

So we have a novel that started from a set of stories with a fantastic tinge and arrived at a vision of the world and of life that moves the reader at least as much as it provokes thought. A vision in which the human essence is something ineffable, transcending space and time, capable of improvement, but also of deterioration, in its journey. At the same time, it is a vision of death that cannot leave any reader indifferent. The novel’s ending reconfigures the entire text, proposing an extremely bold interpretation of a contemporary phenomenon.

Occult Beds contains less exoticism than the stories in the Balkan triptych, but more profound meanings about humanity and the sense of life—meanings it does not state outright, but transposes into poetic images, revealing them only after creating an atmosphere in which such meanings can be deciphered. A disturbing metaphysical novel, with an unpredictable link to our own days.

Americans would call the fantastical-bibliophilic adventure woven into Flori’s life a supernatural thriller, spun through the threads of a dense mystery, in a zigzag of plot twists—an area in which Doina Ruști has proven countless times to be a hard-to-beat master, with a Hitchcockian flair for building and dosing paroxysms.

What has always surprised me about Doina Ruști’s novels is the way they pull you into the story. You read a page, two—and then it’s as if a vortex draws you entirely into the book’s pages, and you come out a few hours later changed, after living a complete sensory experience. Doina Ruști’s novels both assault and indulge all your senses at once: there is music in them, taste, perception, color.

Her descriptions are amplified, like thickened brushstrokes that leap at you from the frame of the page. I’ve always been a big fan of descriptions in books, so I could read pages upon pages without getting bored; and I’ve also always loved historical fiction, and Doina Ruști does an excellent job on that score. I simply can’t imagine how someone can recreate a long-vanished era so faithfully that, as a reader, you are 100% convinced everything was exactly as described and happened precisely so.

In Occult Beds we have almost 300 pages of pure writerly talent.

A novel just as astonishing, poised on the fragile, unsettling border between the real and the imaginary—the fabulous. With an action that oscillates between our days (mad traffic, mobile phones, Google and the net, 21st-century Bucharest) and the times of two hundred years ago—with their unhurried life, carriages and coaches, enslaved Roma, rare houses steeped in perfumes, dusty roads, ponds and fishponds, flower gardens and even carob trees, marriageable girls tending their dowries, and above all craftsmen who knew how to work wood into the necessities of a home—for instance, a bed. One such craftsman carves, from the carob trees of a garden he cuts down to the last one, twenty-four beds, each more ornate, more famous than the next. Some have been lost, others ruined, burned by clueless owners, but at least six have survived into our days and become the subject of the novel: those who sleep in them change their faces, or if they make love in them they do not part—at least for a while. Doina Ruști’s science of creating and telling a story is captivating, and her mastery is surely aided by the fact that she knows the era of two centuries ago as no one else among our writers today—proof being her previous novels set in that time. In Doina Ruști the two eras are not divergent; they communicate, they understand each other, you can pass from one into the other—the proof is the chapter about the carob forest, in which a hero from our days scratches his name into a tree’s bark and then gets lost in the forest—fabulous! I would call it South American magical realism.

In fact, the whole novel seems to build, ever more grippingly, toward this final chapter entitled “The Carob Trees.” A forest of wild carobs stretching over an immense area, from which the hero who enters can no longer leave (“if you turn back, you turn into particles, which will divide down to the last crumb, which rainwater will dissolve, and that last matter—without thought, without consciousness—will slide into the magma of the Earth, where it will feel forever the suffering of failure”), surrounded by shadows that were once living beings: a world without time, without traces, only the swaying of dancing carobs—and if there are no traces, you are condemned to nothingness, until someone comes and begins to cut down the trees and make beds from them; the beds, in turn, are destroyed after a long time: some are burned, or ground into pencils with which poems and love letters are written. And somewhere there is a white door between the two worlds; you pass through it and arrive in today’s Bucharest, just as fascinating.

A fabulous novel that will delight anyone, even those who might want more pulse-pounding action, as in thrillers. In Occult Beds there is everything!

Written in a style that reminds us of the works of the great classics of the genre (Gabriel García Márquez, Mircea Eliade, etc.), using a baroque, ultra-descriptive harmony, full of an abundance of details and sensations meant to reveal the hidden face of the ordinary world—evoking a millepede-like story that seems to expand in all directions, labyrinthine—its narration flowing without interruption like an endless piece of music and bringing, almost at every sentence, a surprise of an aesthetic or dramaturgical kind, Doina Ruști’s novel can be considered a landmark for the contemporary genre of magical realism. And this also because, beyond its style (stylistic appreciation being, without doubt, the area of maximum subjectivity in each of our perceptions of any work of art), the story contains both the reference tropes of this genre (the blending of real context with the supernatural event, authorial reticence, a privileged revelation of reality, the mixing of opposing categories: urban–rural, present–past, mind–body, physical plane–astral plane, etc.) and the specific atmosphere in which mystery becomes an intrinsic part of everyday normality.

The story begins somewhat unexpectedly in a detective-novel register, stirring the reader’s curiosity through the mystery of a possible murder that must be clarified, and along the way transforms into a metaphysical exploration of the surrounding world (“You have lost paradise… be content with what you remember of it”), with dreams (and the beds that generate them) functioning like portals—gateways that grant access to the backstage of a tesseract-like, multidimensional universe full of doors that can be opened to reach other times and other places, to access, as in a trance, other spatio-temporal coordinates of (un)reality.

“Everything is metaphor,” Doina Ruști tells us, in an ultra-succinct statement slipped into the pages of this novel, where we see reality and dream mixing, spaces decomposing and recomposing into the most unexpected forms, energies (also called the soul) transmigrating endlessly through countless shapes and states (people, trees, objects) in an eternal circuit of transformation—of coming, leaving, and infinite return (“If you still haven’t realized it, that’s the drama: no one dies!”)—through which we gain a sensation of transcendent fullness that tells us the perceptible world is only a tiny, poor fragment of a modular, malleable cosmos whose limits far exceed the limits of our imagination: “You could be anything; you could modify the universe you passed through.” We also note the way the problem of knowledge is approached—more precisely, our limits in accessing it. Using the same metaphoric register (which does not state a theory directly, but “clothes” it in a story), Doina Ruști illustrates her vision through the character Căpriceanu, a young physicist thirsty for fame through deciphering the universe’s secrets, who dies prematurely without access to them (because, isn’t it so?, man is a finite being and, due to this precarious ontological condition, no one can have direct access to the thing-in-itself, to the Great Truth: “But My face you shall not see, for no man shall see Me and live”; Exodus 33:20). No less, the surreal trajectory of this character and the way his calling (“this is man’s true nature—to cling to a calling and remain there as in a dream”) becomes a spatio-temporal game that cancels the apparent logic of known physics, bring into relief the book’s proposed vision of the Universe: Căpriceanu exits (through death) the physical world of Bucharest of the 2000s (a world that denied him access to knowledge, immortality, and love), enters a metaphysical background (that reality behind appearances) where he gains access to a certain understanding of things, and returns to the physical world in the form of a tree—a carob growing in a Bucharest garden of the 1800s. The carob is transformed into a bed, and that occult bed traverses two centuries in our physical world to find Flori again on the same spatio-temporal coordinates from which it had departed as a man—thus giving birth to a perfect physico-metaphysical paradox. And yes, we thus find that indeed “everything is metaphor,” that is, appearance—an appearance resulting from an infinite substitution between reality and its perception.

I will not give more details about the plot itself (since it is better for each reader to discover it alone), but I will add that its pages include both accounts of love stories caught in all their contortions, as well as a small tableau of the bohemian world, a mini-fresco in the background of Bucharest’s cultural-artistic microcosm.

And since we have reached the discussion of the setting in which the novel’s action unfolds, it should also be said that it continues Doina Ruști’s specific hallmark: showing us the fabulous face of places we know, through which we have passed and keep passing, where our everyday existence plays out. It is perhaps the most beautiful declaration of love one can make to a place (or even to a person): to reveal its ineffable face and its spark of magic—something only those who love it know how to see. And Doina Ruști achieves, once again, this metaphysical mirroring: showing us the face of mythological Bucharest as it appears through the lens of love that transfigures it.

Superb—especially the ending, that is, the fantastic part, the one that overturns everything we knew up to that point and offers a new perspective, even if, let’s call it fantastic, and wonderfully completes the main story.
A young woman becomes attached, almost pathologically, to a magical bed that whispers to her at night in dreams and makes her wish never to be separated from it again. Unfortunately, the bed belongs to an aunt who does not live just around the corner from Bucharest, so the young woman is forced to part from it. Time passes; the girl is left only with her father, somewhat failed and rather airy, after her mother abandons them both and remains in Spain with a strawberry grower. And when she learns her aunt has died and goes to the funeral, she discovers, with astonishment, that the bed no longer exists—that it has disappeared, that it is gone. And with it have gone the whispers, the calling, the attraction, the magic.
This leads her to discover, later on, that in Bucharest there are other such beds as well, to which she feels irresistibly drawn—beds that whisper, lure, and call her to seek them. And, of course, she answers.
The story oscillates between past and present, beginning with a sequence from the recent past, from which the story of our days starts, with a young man stabbed in the apartment where the protagonist, Flori, wakes from sleep—having arrived precisely in search of such a troublesome bed.
A love story combined with a splendid fantastic tale and another story from times long gone, from another Bucharest, where we will learn the origin of the occult beds.
More soon—I’m not exactly sure where.

Metempsychotic, multidimensional, shattering, Homeric, Ruști-an, carob-wooded—a book unforgettable, as are all the Doina Ruști books I have read so far!

The living and the dead, the nearby everyday and the imaginary coexist harmoniously, voicing a story of quasi-parallel realms—a story to which various reading keys can be applied: from the detective, crime-fiction one, to the erotic one of love and, of course, the esoteric, occult one— a book-metaphor, a millepede-book, an infinitely comforting book.

The eschatology imposed by Doina Ruști, through this novel, is specific to the posthuman era; in other words, it stakes everything on a belief grounded in a cultural and historical palimpsest.

Although Occult Beds opens like a typical policier novel and, throughout, there will always be the desire to solve the “whodunnit” mystery—plus there are small references to the pandemic—what remains defining for this novel is the way the reading “pulls” you into the story, so that reading becomes not only an exercise in intellectual savor, but also a sensory experience, because it stimulates and indulges your senses throughout the book: from the visual frames (“Through the window the light came in like summer dust, in thin waves, and from the walls the shoes, lined up and well-behaved, looked like the eyes of a sick monster,” p. 24), to the specific music (“[…] the rustle of the carobs could be heard, from the attic of that house the whole unfinished story burst forth, [Flori] saw in her mind the dancer, the cobza player, the room with shoes. […] She wanted to find the source of that rustle, to answer its call,” p. 36), all the way to tactile or olfactory perception (the first carob cut from Pipica’s garden, the wife of Valakis: “It wasn’t an ordinary carob. It was white-dusted, elastic and alive. You couldn’t tell its age; no grain pattern showed as it usually does. The wood was compact, dense, like a hazelnut shell in which white flowers had fallen asleep. And it had the scent of overripe cherries,” p. 117).

In this novel the surreal insertions are found both at the narrative and imagistic level, and in the plane of mediumistic characters, or in the way the vegetal realm is approached: in a way, Doina Ruști’s carobs made me think of Gellu Naum’s Animal-Tree. With the publication of Occult Beds, surreal tools become an integral part of the novelist Doina Ruști’s narrative kit, refining and diversifying her writing even further.

See also Critical Reception

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