The Accident arrives as something of an appendix to the massiveJournal of Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945), a record of his life as a Romanian Jewish writer from 1935 to 1944. Though Sebastian is known in Romania for his plays and, to a lesser extent, his novels, to my knowledge nothing of his appeared in English until his Journal was published in 2000, chronicling the horrors and fears of life in Romania during World War II. The Accident is his first translated work of fiction.
Next to the immediacy of the Journal, The Accident initially disappoints. The novel begins promisingly with an evocative scene in which the intense, quixotic Nora falls while exiting a tram and is helped up by the downtrodden intellectual Paul. They tentatively embark on a rushed affair driven by Nora’s fixation on Paul, which frightens and liberates them. But the novel then loses its way in a flashback chronicling Paul’s earlier involvement with Ann, a dreary artist. Ann clearly represents the faux-bohemian life that has ensnared Paul, but both she and Paul remain too diffuse for this section to take hold as a picture of the limits of Paul’s life. Paul’s criticism of Ann’s paintings telegraphs the problem with their entire milieu: “There’s something gesticulating in your paintings. They’re too hearty, too talkative, too familiar at the first glance.” Ann replies: “I am talkative, I am frivolous.”
The greater import of The Accident reveals itself only against the background of Sebastian’s Journal, which described in some detail his writing of the novel. But the greater context is crucial as well. The Journal was not published until 1996 (it was translated into in English in 2000), when its portrayal of Romanian complicity in the Holocaust caused controversy. Over 300,000 Romanian Jews died during World War II, a large percentage by death squads set up by Romania’s own aggressively anti-Semitic government. Sebastian was fortunate to live in Bucharest, which was spared the worst of Romania’s policies, but he witnessed the virulent anti-Semitism and deportations and heard firsthand accounts of the government’s massacres carried out on the orders of Prime Minister Ion Antonescu. Sebastian sensitively, painfully chronicled details of the Holocaust as it was happening that many would not know until after the war. Sebastian survived the war, only to be killed in an auto accident in 1945.
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Over at the National Post, Randy Boyagoda reviews the latest title in the Biblioasis International Translation Series: Mihail Sebastian's The Accident, translated from the Romanian by Stephen Henighan.All serious writers have at least two dreams. The primal dream is of immediate discovery: at a preposterously early point in your career, Important People will discover your genuine greatness and encourage it along, putting you in place for decades of attention and accolades. Call this the Philip Roth model of literary success. The back-up dream is of posthumous discovery: many years after one has lived, written and died, Important People somehow come across your work, perceive its true worth, and make up for your life of being ignored by introducing you, posthumously, to enthusiastic new generations of readers. Call this the John Kennedy Toole model of literary success. Of course, most successful literary writers live out more modest versions of one or of both of these dreams.
In recent years, however, the posthumous discovery, at least by English-language readers, of books by otherwise little-known international writers such as Robert Bolaño and Irene Némirovsky has been newsworthy for the intense interest and runaway success of their works upon the release of English translations. In both of these instances, the inherent strengths of the works are matched by both their authors’ compelling and tragic stories and by breathless tales of the works’ miraculous uncovering.
If not as prodigious as Bolaño or as emotive and dramatic as Némirovsky, the Jewish-Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian is nevertheless very much deserving of fresh discovery today, which has been made possible by the first-ever publication of his fiction in English — in this case his final novel, The Accident. Long a respected name in European circles, Sebastian, a lawyer, playwright, intellectual and novelist who grimly suffered through a succession of anti-Semitic cruelties and indignities during the Second World War only to be fatally hit by a truck after the war ended, enjoyed a flurry of English-language attention about a decade ago with the translation of his war-era diary,Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years (which won rare praise from Philip Roth, incidentally, among many others). One hopes this new book, whose lyricism and depth of feeling have been made wonderfully apparent thanks to Stephen Henighan’s elegant translation, will only expand his English readership.
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The Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian (1907-45) came to the attention of the English-speaking world in 2000 with the publication of his incandescently angry and exacting World War II diaries. Yet during the war—as he survived in Bucharest, shunned by his Nazi-supporting former friends—he wrote "The Accident" (Biblioasis, 257 pages, $17.95), a captivating novel about a love affair.
"The Accident," translated by Stephen Henighan, would be a marvel of beauty and control under any circumstance; that it was written by a Jew in Romania in 1940 seems miraculous. ...The mountains provide an escape for Paul from his paralyzing lovesickness—just as the writing of the novel, we suspect, transported Sebastian from what he called in his diaries the "anti-Semitic dementia" of his daily surroundings. As in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," the snowbound fastnesses seem to warp the standard measurements of time. When Paul takes to the slopes—the skiing scenes are the best I've read since Mann's—time's passage thrillingly compresses and expands in his consciousness ...
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