George Balaita
Biography
George Balaita (1935-2017), one of the classic prose writers of contemporary Romanian literature. He graduated from the Philology Faculty of the A.I. Cuza University in Jassy in 1967 and subsequently worked as a draughtsman, supply teacher and P.E. instructor. From 1964, he worked as an editor and later assistant editor-in-chief for Ateneu magazine, published in Bacau. In 1979, he moved to Bucharest, where he held the position of secretary to the Writers Union. Between 1980 and 1989, he was director of the Cartea Romaneasca publishing house. His books, which have been published in numerous editions and translated into a number of languages, include Calatoria (The Voyage, 1964), Conversind despre Ionescu (Conversing about Ionescu, 1966), Intimplari din Noaptea Soarelui de Lapte...
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Novel, Fiction LTD series, Polirom, 2016, 216 pages Book presentationThe novel rewrites an old Romanian fairy tale by one of Romanian literature’s most important storytellers, Ion Creanga. But the modern approach taken by writer George Balaita lends the story a different meaning, introducing fantastical characters, adding colour and depth to the devils with whom Stan, the protagonist comes into contact, and adding a contemporary satirical note to the peasant world Creanga created. A cohabitation, with multiple meanings, between people and devils, between people who acquire devilish characteristics and devils who you sense are capable of humane acts – this is how George Balaita sums up his novel. It is a book that contains a lot of humour, and also a moral. It is a spectacle, which sets out to reinterpret one of the greatest writers in Romanian literature. |
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Novel, "George Balaita" series, Polirom, 2011, 560 pages Book presentationIn a provincial town, Antipa, a commuting functionary, is amusing himself with some friends. As a joke, he wagers at random on the life and death of some acquaintances. No sooner have they been ‘scheduled’ than they die. Are we dealing with a seer or a charlatan? A dark legend springs up around this man endowed with hellish powers that he himself refuses to take seriously. All the more so given that in his home town he is ‘the most docile of domestic animals.’ This is a book that encompasses what it means to be alive, and therefore forever menaced by death, almost in its entirety. Between irony and a certain cold (in other words, ‘Nordic’) pathétisme, the social, political and historical backdrop is discreetly, but no less emphatically, thrown into relief: a closed society, where boredom breeds monsters.
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