Chapou:
Romanian writer Doina Ruști was among the authors invited to the Leipzig International Book Fair, where Romania was Guest of Honour, and where the German translation of her novel The Phantom in the Mill was presented to the public in several literary events.
Doina Ruști was among the Romanian writers invited to the Leipzig International Book Fair, an edition at which Romania held the status of Guest of Honour, bringing together many leading voices of contemporary Romanian literature.
On this occasion, the novel Fantoma din moară (Das Phantom in der Mühle), translated into German by Eva Wemme, was introduced to the German-speaking public through a series of literary discussions and book-signing events.
The novel was reviewed by Markus Bauer in an extensive article published in the prestigious daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The review highlights the originality of the novel’s narrative construction and its unconventional approach to exploring Romania’s recent history. The critic emphasizes the fusion of realism, symbolism, and fantastical elements, as well as the central role of the mill as a space of memory, fear, and the pressure exerted by the totalitarian state on individual lives.
First published in 2008, Fantoma din moară was awarded the Romanian Writers’ Union Prize for Prose and has continued to enjoy steady international critical reception.
The mill is a hybrid being: “from the front it looks like a gigantic cross, but also like a fabulous two-headed creature,” and between these two symbols unfold the biographies of the village’s inhabitants.
The Securitate plays a decisive role in the story—not only as a real “institution,” but as a power that governs people’s thoughts. Here, too, the polymorphous demon of the mill determines the course of events, placing people in strange situations. It appears as a light phenomenon, a snake, a cloud, a figure dissolving into ash, a colored dot. At the same time, the Phantom functions as a narrative catalyst that makes visible the hidden drives—especially of a sexual nature—that shape behavior. The brief third part of the novel may be read as a “resolution” of this belief in ghosts.
Doina Ruști’s book offers a form of resistance to many literary conventions in its approach to the biography of twentieth-century Romania.
— Markus Bauer, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Markus Bauer, about "Das Phantom in der Mühle” (by Doina Ruști) in Neue Zürcher Zeitung
