Review
These moving memories, stories and poems explore the mind-warping paranoia created by Romania's notorious dictatorship, and are a brutally honest insight into the bleakness of its post-communist disillusion. --Helena Drysdale
Review
A mature book from a young author, whose writing already carries the fingerprints of a personal style with powerful lyrical accents, that decants in a language crossed by a rough, uncensored sensibility contrasting images from a disintegrated universe recomposed in words from the substance of nostalgia. The Wooden Tongue Speaks is a collection of short stories and poems gathered in an organic composite through which Bogdan is trying to reconstitute the map of some inner guide-marks and cardinal points meant to put him back in contact with the world of his roots that he lost a long time ago. His memories related to the land that he had to quit while being a child depicts a time-stained chart, not entirely accurate... Some layouts got faded, unreadable or blurred, but these gray zones, shadowy, make the image of a Romania haunted by the poltergeists of communism to appear in a mysterious light that incites, not to political reflections, but rather to introversion and meditation over the way in which time and the cultural origins are shaping and coining the souls. The whole book is crossed by a humanist breeze, closer to the spirit of the so-called classical literature than to post-modern writing. While on a journey that follows the way to his roots, Bogdan reveals his characters, making them speak their minds in their inner language and he substitutes his fictional ego almost entirely to their voices. Unusually, his own avatar doesn't appear to play the main part, but integrated among the others as in a group picture. His narrative style has a remarkable capacity of synthesis. Throughout some condensed descriptive lines, we are guided towards nucleons of meaning coagulated around some strong images that overpass the borders of the contextual background of the stories: "Poverty has a way of making you believe", "They are born with an ingrown taste for survival", "She'd forgiven them, and if she could forgive then God could too" etc. Bogdan speaks in the "wooden tongue" about the burdens of a nation crushed by a "heavy history" and about its power of moral survival. Not accidentally the prologue of this suite of short stories and lyrics is a confession that immortalizes, in a twilight atmosphere, the image of a happy childhood that he spent in the cityscape of a Romanian Danubian harbour or port. Despite the necessity of subsistence in a sick society, the people found some secret escape valves and a particular type of freedom.
