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DEX-ul si sexul In his new collection of essays, the author decides to use humor, irony and cynicism as weapons against stereotypes, common places and many other things that build up the boredom and the burden of life. Anything can be a good subject if you see it from the proper angle: the use of the four letter words and – in close connection to this – the sexual devices in the country life, the banking system and its failures, the stupidity of media and of the racist slogans, even the common „prince of Africa” spam on your computer.„Radu Pavel Gheo tells about things we have to deal with on a daily basis, things we usually don’t react against, even if we should. He talks about things that depress when they should amuse us. If one must find a fundamental feature of this book, that feature has to be the humor”. (Luminita Marcu, excerpt from the preface of the book)
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FAIRIA – o lume indepartata (FAIRIA – A Land Far Away) – novel Many years after the human race had left their half-destroyed native planet, and chose a life in the more hospitable space colonies, the Earth is visited by an android. He questions one of the few people who chose to leave here: Ronnie Peterschneitt. This old man is the former commanding officer of an expedition that visited a strange planet, Fairia. The book is the story of this adventure, as it comes out from the dialogue between the man and the android. The spaceship Skylark mysteriously breaks down when it reaches Fairia’s orbit. The members of the crew descend on the planet, being aware they have to live here until the dubious arrival of a rescue expedition. To their surprise, they find themselves in a world of the childhood’s fairy tales and myths. Their first meeting with an inhabitant of the planet is mind-boggling: they watch a fight between a kind of Prince Charming, called Brave Soul, and a talking dragon with three heads. Later on, they’ll have the bad (or good) chance to meet the a supposedly wicked, but beautiful witch, Vickyia, whose destiny is entwined with theirs and that of the planet. The story of the travel following from here is crisscrossed by a parallel reality, although at first this seems to constitute only a series of hallucinations of the commanding officer Ronnie Peterschneitt. From time to time, he finds himself alone, in a burning desert, terrified by the suspicion that his companions are dead and all the adventures of the expedition are actually the last pulses of his agonizing brain. After a lot of adventures, implying medieval knights, leprechauns, but also creatures from the Greek mythology, living rocks or Egyptian mutants, some of the human beings use a wooden ship to float through the stars, return home and descend on the Moon, arousing the stupefaction of the people from the research center from there. The mystery of their intricate adventure still lives. Although the book includes here and there hidden references to similar works (Swift, S.T. Coleridge, Jules Verne, A. de Saint-Exupery, Michael Ende, etc.), they don’t have to be noticed; nor they obstruct the reader from following the adventure – a pure story, written in order to entertain and – if possible – to instruct. A little. |
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Romanii e destepti This collection of essays addresses mainly the Romanian public and exposes some of the flaws and evils affecting this country. Romania is striving to become a NATO partner and a UE member, but the structure of its society retains a series of features coming from the communist regime. Also, the hyper-modernity and the luxury of an upper class from some areas combines with a state of retardation and poverty from some other areas and social levels. Romanians IS Smart is trying to criticize and demolish some of the common places affecting the Romanians’ way of thinking and the structuring of their society. It combines criticism of the society as a whole with an ironic view of Romanian culture. The irony (and self-irony), witticism, derision, and mockery are the weapons the author uses in his attempt to unveil some of the flaws of his world: nationalism, gerontocracy, mediocrity, self-delusion, overestimation etc. It is a book about a world that has to cease existing, but also about a world of a strangely attractive exoticism for foreign visitors |
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Adio, adio, patria mea Farewell, My Homeland, Farewell... is a collection on essays written in the United States and about the United States. The book tries to answer a question which is very familiar to East-European immigrants: “Is America the Paradise on Earth?” Presenting a world quite different from the one he left, the author tries to create a vivid image of contemporary life in the USA, as seen from inside, at the level of a normal inhabitant of this world. Sometimes ironic, even malicious, at other times sympathetic or compassionate, Radu Pavel Gheo talks about the prosperity and poverty of the USA, about the patriotism, honesty or naivety of the inhabitants, about the tragedy of September 11, about propaganda, freedom, authoritarianism, but he doesn’t forget the common events of everyday life of this world: ineffective thieves, unlucky geese, unfamiliar food and customs, happy or unhappy immigrants, etc. America -– as seen with the eyes of a stranger -– is a complex world, compared with (but unparalleled by) Europe, and the book is both a view over the ocean and a means of mirroring for the American culture. |
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Despre science fiction Despre science fiction (On Science Fiction) is one of the few theoretical studies dedicated entirely to this literary genre and published in Romania in the last thirty years. In the first part of the book, the author tries to find the proper place of the literature generally termed “science fiction” inside the larger area of prose writings. In his theoretical approach, he focuses on some specific features of the science fiction, such as the SF idea, the preferred chronotope(s) of this type of fiction, the specificity of the fictional worlds created by the science fiction authors, as compared with the fictional worlds of the fantastic, “realist” or absurd literature. The second part of the book includes some critical studies, where the author applies his theoretical principles in analyzing the work of some major writers from Romania and abroad. A larger study is dedicated to the famous and controversial American author Philip K. Dick. Some of the conclusive essays lean towards literary sociology, viewing the SF literature as a constituent of a larger assembly of habits, attitudes and social responses to the reality.
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Valea Cerului Senin Valea Cerului Senin (The Valley of the Clear Blue Sky) is a collection of short stories and novellas built around imaginary, alternative worlds, in combination with the use of fantastic motives. The author focuses on some great archetypes of the mankind and imagines alternative futures, starting from the legend of the Holy Grail, the biblical myth of Judgment Day, some other myths and legendary figures. A custodian from an orbital space station finds out he is one of the numberless faces of a mediaeval myth: Parsifal, the knight who found the Holy Grail. On an Earth drained of resources, a space-traveling rock ’n roll Bard (a future-day avatar of the ancient Homer) tells the story of a prophet who has been crucified on Mars. When only the human beings and the corn become the major forms of life that survived a planetary disaster, people decide to legalize cannibalism; in a few decades the decision is socially accepted, and the human flesh becomes the regular menu. These are some of the starting points for the stories in the book. Beyond the general warning tone (so specific for numerous science fiction writings), the reader can feel author’s pleasure of telling inciting – and, sometimes, shocking – stories. |
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