A good time for knitting and reading. The scarf required concentration that got in the way of other things.
After finishing many long lines of garter stitch, I went back to reading - more of Ismail Kadare, this time Chronicle in Stone, a novel based on his memories of a wartime childhood. Kadare grew up in Gjirokaster, an Albanian city that was invaded and occupied during WWII first by Italians, then Greeks, the Italians again, then Germans, and finally Albanian Partisans, who ushered in Enver Hoxha's long dictatorship. (Kadare also invokes previous invaders - the Slavs, the Ottomans and the Romans, among others.)
I enjoy memoirs and history, but often a novel can tell the truth far better than non-fiction. Kadare was only 4 or 5 when the war began, but the novel's main character is older. An introduction to the book says Kadare has revised and edited the work several times since its initial appearance in 1971.
Nevertheless, when reading Chronicle in Stone, you feel this is what it was really like to be a child in a war-wracked city, nowhere near the main battlefields of that war, but constantly affected by far-away incomprehensible events.
Recently the UU Partner Church Council Chatline had a lively discussion of books to read before going to Transylvania. Along with recommendations for histories of all descriptions came a few suggestions for novels. (I recommended Miklos Banffy's 3-volume Transylvania Trilogy, which I don't really expect people to read, although I've been raving about it for 10 years to anyone who would listen.)
Then, last fall, after a 5th trip to Romania, I finally read the classic we all avoid mentioning: Dracula.
"Dracula," the name, not the novel, is the first thing most people talk about if you tell them you're going to Transylvania. Bram Stoker, the author, had only a cursory acquaintance with Transylvania, and yet his descriptions, over-wrought and intentionally foreboding as they are, can be startlingly accurate. The train journey from Cluj to Bucharest goes through jagged mountains that seem to rise straight up from roads and rails, through dense dark green forests. It's easy to let the imagination run.
What's interesting about Dracula the book, is the insistence, throughout, on its modernity. It is written as a series of letters among a number of characters who often contrast their contemporary, progressive world (of the late 19th century) with the primitive superstition represented by the idea of the undead. When they must deal with ancient horrors, they communicate by the ever-present telegraph, and rush back and forth by train.
It's a good read, but I'm glad I waited! Here's a picture of the real Transylvania, far from dense forests and forbidding mountains...(but that IS a graveyard in the foregound.)
