Clutching a bouquet of flowers, hurrying to catch his bus, and arguing with the driver once he's on, a man rushes to a train station platform to meet a woman. This sequence of events occurs and recurs in remarkably different variations in Vain Art of the Fugue. In one version, the bus driver ignores the traffic signals and is killed in the ensuing crash. In another, the protagonist is thrown off the bus, and as he chases after it, a crowd of strangers joins him in the pursuit. As the book unfolds, the protagonist, his lovers, and the people he meets become increasingly vivid and complex figures in the crowded Bucharest cityscape. Themes, conflicts, and characters interweave and overlap, creating a book that is at once chaotic and perfectly composed.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Noted Romanian writer Tsepeneag spins out a blizzard of variations on a simple anecdote, marvelously echoing the fugue's repeated statement of subtly differing themes. In Tsepeneag's simple tale, a man is sitting on a bus, flowers in hand, concerned that he will miss the train he is hoping to meet—or is he catching it? At the train station, he waits impatiently for Maria (or is it Magda?) while watching the strange parade of humanity: peasants cradling giant fish, train engineers telling long-winded anecdotes, an Italian tourist struggling to understand the conductor's rapid-fire Romanian. Sometimes the scene switches suddenly, and our protagonist is at the beach or in prison; other times, the action shifts from him to other, unnamed characters, who watch his furious and ultimately fruitless attempts to maintain order. A few of the 25 segments fall flat or fail to adequately distinguish themselves, and none resolves (in fact, most loop back). Yet there is a sublime lunacy to watching objects lose their meanings, people exchange roles and the protagonist suddenly surge ahead quixotically, as when he (repeatedly) runs alongside the bus wearing a T-shirt emblazoned, in gold letters, "LOVE." (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
". . . a burlesque Kafka, at once comical and ominous." --Bookforum
"It's the sort of novel everyone who thinks he/she knows what novels should be like ought to read, and be utterly disabused of such certainty." --The Reading Experience blog
"The endless refraction of images and words is both disorienting and
weirdly affecting, the way dreams are...[and it] radiates the ominous
dark sheen of half-recalled trauma....[Tsepeneag] induces the sense
that memory, time, and consciousness are both mutable and, ultimately,
unknowable." --Elizabeth Hand, Village Voice
"It's the sort of novel everyone who thinks he/she knows what novels should be like ought to read, and be utterly disabused of such certainty." --The Reading Experience blog
"The endless refraction of images and words is both disorienting and
weirdly affecting, the way dreams are...[and it] radiates the ominous
dark sheen of half-recalled trauma....[Tsepeneag] induces the sense
that memory, time, and consciousness are both mutable and, ultimately,
unknowable." --Elizabeth Hand, Village Voice
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