Voicing the Unspeakable in Alexandru Vona’s Fiction

Abstract

Since 1993, when Alexandru Vona’s novel Ferestre zidite [Bricked-Up Windows] has finally been published, critics and scholars have repeatedly tried to find the right frame for interpreting this exceptional work. Some of them insisted on those strategies that make it, to a certain extent, similar to Surrealists’ writings; others found reasons to compare its bizarre atmosphere to that in Kafka’s or Robert Walser’s prose, while others noticed its affinities with the Gothic novel. However, most of them have acknowledged the uncommonness of Alexandru Vona’s fiction, insisting on the writer’s endeavour to reveal a strange sense of frailty. Written in the first person, Ferestrele zidite represents more than an attempt to harmonise memory and oblivion, writing and remembering, inner exile and mystery. It explores in depth one of the fundamental dimensions of human condition: its frailty in relationship with Death.

Keywords

• poetics of silence
• spectrality
• inner exile
• paramnesia
• memory
• space