Flying Against the Arrow
An Intellectual in Ceausescu's Romania
Translator:
ISBN:
978-963-9116-57-3
cloth
$79.00 / €69.00 / £63.00
Publication date:
2003
262 pages
Where to buy online:
Translated from the best selling Romanian edition, Flying against the Arrow, this quasi-autobiographical book describes the life of an intellectual living under extreme political conditions, paying particular attention to the ‘unbearable 80s’. The book vividly portrays the difficulties encountered by a young intellectual trying to shape himself under the oppressive Ceauşescu regime and provides a stark depiction of a man’s intellectual suffocation under hard-line socialist rule. The book’s overall significance is therefore far more wideranging than just Romania or the 1980s.
275 diary entries
"There is a feeling unpleasant to the writer; namely that what is said darkens the capricious richness of life. That I used this to be the way in which I describe myself is beyond question, and yet, if the meaning is well enough expressed, the immediate body of my already shattered life is not quite there… All that cannot become intelligence is condemned to perish, which is unfair. No increase of intelligence can be achieved without a preliminary mutation in the refining of sensibility. To talk endlessly about what you have thought is vain and deceiving… When you do not believe in miracles you are likely to have a distorted vision of what a miracle is: you believe that a miracle is something which does not happen. On the contrary, what is characteristic of a miracle is its presence.”
“This is indeed a unique writing in Romanian culture, mainly owing to its quality as a moral and intellectual Bildungsroman, in effect unprecedented to this date. An exciting book, extremely inquisitive, sparkingly elegant and always freshingly invigorating.”