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confusion as a general state of being, in which surrealist irony has its purging role. The author
reminds us that the standards of happiness promoted by communism were more often than not
accompanied by people’s incapacity to reach their illusory frame. Like Aglaja Veteranyi, Ana Maria
Sandu is able to reveal some of the rather unspeakable aspects of women’s behavior, such as
sexuality associated with failure, lack of intimate hygiene, unbearable emotional bonds, family
violence etc.
The shifting and fluid subjectivity among characters and of the story fragments suggests the idea
of becoming as work in progress, not as tense and disintegrating as in Aglaja Veterany’s story, but
drawing on a strong desire to transform and survive against all odds, as it is obvious in Simona
Popescu’s work too. If in Popescu’s book the sense of historical time is rather abolished and replaced
with a personal sense of present temporality, Sandu plays with the clock hands and the calendar,
turning back the clock, then moving from past perfect to future in the past, in order to clarify aspects
related to the present time.
Although there are several male figures who play mostly negative roles in Sandu’s book, such as a
drinking grandfather, a depressive father, a rapist, an illegal abortionist, embodiments of positive
characters still exist: a motorcyclist who saves a girl from self‐drowning, a young man who does not
reject his pregnant lover, or a man who offers love to a married woman whose husband does not
love her anymore. But if there is any feminism in Ana Maria Sandu’s novel, it is grounded in the
capacity to distinguish between the good and the evil nature of the emotions generated by
complicated human relationships.
However, the author does not offer easy answers, but rather asks questions of a surrealist nature.
For instance, she imagines that the unborn has its own consciousness and can react against abortion
or that the spirit of a dead great‐grandmother may play a more significant role than expected in a
present love relationship. The author cultivates intense emotions which are often meant to change
the décor and the relationship between characters. In a metafictional fashion and wearing the mask
of a feminine character, she reflects on the writing process, questioning creativity and the subject of
her book:
I am not sure what hurts more: the stubborn enormous wound that clings like a limpet
to me or the fact that I made it live. I brought it out, I have rolled it out from one page to
another, we have played “mother and Ina.” That’s over now. I have made up “what if”
scenarios for more than three months now. Unhappiness is too big a responsibility and as
dangerous as any other hereditary disease. 17
The agency of the unborn and the pondering over the role of imagination in dealing with
unhappiness may be viewed as subtle and distant reflections on the long‐term effects of the
communist totalitarian regime on everyday life. Inner reality in Sandu’s novel is more agonizing,
more helpless and gloomier than in Popescu’s book, in which total indifference to anything political
and the extensive reference to world literature seem to be the very conditions for artistic freedom.
In contrast, Veteranyi’s story abounds in political criticism, almost entirely a mirror image of the
adults’ perspective, which is innocently taken over by the child.
However, the most overtly political of all works is Carmen Bugan’s memoir, entitled Burying the
Typewriter. Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, in which the author presents her father’s
dissidence against the communist regime and the effects of his protests upon the condition of their
family, living in a rural community from Galați county, Romania. As the author mentions in her book,
she wrote it before she could read any of the archives of the former Securitate service, now available
to the public, so that her memoir preserves much of her innocence regarding the constant
surveillance specific to the 1980s.
In comparison with the other three books, Bugan’s memoir fosters an interest in philosophical
values such as freedom, truth, justice and the pursuit of happiness, during a historical decade when
Romania was in the grip of poverty caused by the often inadequate strategies of the Communist
Party. Despite the food shortage, censorship and general discontentment, the author vividly reminds