Vain Art of the Translated Romanian Novel

Vain Art of the Fugue, a new translation of a 15-year-old book written by Romanian author Dumitru Tepeneag and translated by Patrick Camiller, is hard to classify. The titles of lists that show up in the "Listmania!" section on Amazon.com-which are supposed to relate to the book in some way-include "Delicious Erotic Romance" and "Essential Submarine Books." Tepeneag's book is neither a collection of titillating stories nor a thrilling maritime tale, as these associations imply. It is a story written in the style of the fugue-a composition, usually musical, in which one main theme is introduced, then repeated over and over in a slightly varied form. It's interesting that Tepeneag has chosen to call the art of writing a fugue "vain" in his book's title; although the word "vain" can mean either "narcissistic" or "useless," readers will probably think that the latter possibility is more applicable. That's because the book is more a collection of disjointed images than a coherent story, and anyone who tries to understand exactly what's going on is working in vain.

Vain Art of the Fugue tells the story of a nameless man who wakes up one morning, says goodbye to his lover, Maria, and runs past a man killing a pig in order to catch a bus to a train station so that he can pick up an old flame named Magda. After the theme is introduced, Tepeneag alters it in several ways: the man misses the bus and chases after it. The man is thrown off the bus. The bus crashes, instantly killing the driver. Sometimes, the story shifts to a woman (presumably Magda) on the train, sitting across from a man who has exceedingly strange habits. In every variation, the man reaches below his seat and takes out "something wrapped in several pieces of cloth: no, it couldn't be a child ... there was a large fish inside."

Though the writing is intriguing and whimsical, it is not always easy to understand what is happening in the different permutations of the story. One gets the impression that the Fugue is intended to be the literary equivalent of Run Lola Run or Groundhog Day, but the book is too hard to follow to achieve the same effect as its cinematic counterpart. Tepeneag often switches back and forth between first-person and third-person narration, sometimes mid-page, sometimes mid-paragraph, and his prose makes leaps in time and space without warning. One minute we're on the bus, and by the next sentence, we're on the beach with Maria. This makes it difficult to tell the different movements of the fugue apart from one another, as well as which characters are involved when.

Since Tepeneag is devoted to playing with traditional narrative structure, character development seems to have been almost altogether sacrificed. Tepeneag's characters are nothing more than devices through which he can experiment with prose, rather than fully realized people in their own right. There are several questions the book raises but never answers. Why is Magda coming to visit the protagonist in the first place? Why doesn't Maria care that someone with whom her lover clearly had a passionate relationship is coming to town? Is Maria unaware of Magda's past with the protagonist? The ambivalence and jadedness of the characters is somewhat reminiscent of characters crafted by more renowned European contemporaries such as Milan Kundera, but in Vain Art of the Fugue, it's severe to the point that it makes you wonder if perhaps a little too much was lost in translation from Romanian.

That doesn't mean there's nothing positive to say about Vain Art of the Fugue. Tepeneag, or at least his translator, does have a way with words. He sprinkles some interesting, rather biting recurring images throughout his book-describing the "searing claw of the sun" and a traveler's "servile waiter's smile." He also has a sense of humor that peaks out from time to time, such as in a variation where the protagonist begins to eat train tickets: "She gave me encouraging looks and showed me an older, slightly larger ticket, but that kind was too sweet. Besides, it's not healthy to eat too much of anything." These attributes, though, may not be enough to make up for the frustrating elements of Fugue. Chances are, readers will find themselves agreeing with an exasperated character who aptly says, "I pushed my way through and set off again: what did I care about all that nonsense?"