If I were to live life over again, I would....

I just finished Adam and Eve and I must say it was an interesting read. I'm quite surprised, though, for it's totally unlike Rebreanu's first two novels.

I appreciated the author's imaginative skill at work in this novel--there are many characters, events, and circumstances--and yet he sought to unify the seven short stories by threading them with a common plot structure. Though this is ingenious, I must say I found it bland after two or three stories. The characters, for the most part, lack depth and credibility, and though the embodiments are in different centuries and social strata, I would have liked to see a more common personality or at least one or two characteristics to unify the person. Theoretically, the novel is about two characters in different lives, but practically, it read like fourteen characters acting out the same script with different props.

Not to say the novel is poorly written. Not at all. It's an enjoyable read and quite a refreshing change after some of Rebreanu's more heavy writing. But I can understand why critics would not give considerable attention to this novel.

(It would be interesting, however, to study the thread of Christianity throughout this novel. It seems like Rebreanu has an overall negative view of Christianity, a view that resurfaces to some degree in each of his novels. Since this one spans the length of time, I wonder what he's trying to do with religion in it.)

I don't know really what else to say about this one. Any thoughts, anyone?

What's in a name?

I actually went off on a tangent in my last post. I was going to comment on the interesting structure of the novel Adam and Eve, but became excited with the thought of having Rebreanu and Lewis dialog. I'm afraid I may not have set it up as well as I would have liked, but c'est la vie.

To provide a little structure for the novel, here is a brief description of the seven lives:
1. Mahavira & Navamalika: ancient Indian "untouchable" shepherd falls in love with the king's betrothed (virgin); the two share a brief embrace after which man is captured, tortured, skinned alive, and eventually killed.
2. Unamonu & Isit: Egyptian county governor falls in love with Pharaoh's mistress (mother of three); the two exchange but a few glances, words, and brief hand touches after which Unamonu searches in vain to meet and deliver her from Pharaoh's "house of love"--he is stopped by an arrow in his neck.
3. Gungunum & Hamma: Young Babylonian scribe sees a girl from afar and is haunted by her in his dreams. He never meets her again, for she was taken captive, deflowered, and imprisoned in the House of Women and he was killed in a raid by the enemy-king.
4. Axius & Servilia: Roman cavalier lives contentedly with his wife and children until he meets his wife's maidservant and is nonsensically attracted to her. He runs away on a year-long tour to forget the slave but is haunted by her image and voice, especially in Egypt (deja-vu?). Upon return, he arouses his wife's suspicions, who promptly kills the woman; the man, deciding life is no longer worth living, commits suicide.
5. Adeodatus & Maria: a German medieval monk suffers from a severe obsession with the Virgin Mary, lives his life in dedication to her, and dies at old age only to discover that his entire system of beliefs was false, and he should have pursued love instead of faith.
6. Gaston & Yvonne: a French provincial doctor lives his life according to his atheist revolutionary ideals, yet seems to be missing an important piece of his life. Chancing upon the trial of several monks and nuns, he discovers the woman of his destiny who is condemned to death. The man rushes to save her from condemnation, yet is himself condemned to the guillotine to die several moments after her.
7. Toma Nonvac & Ileana: a Romanian philosophy professor believes he has discovered the meaning of life but cannot settle on a wife. At age 40, he lays eyes on a young wife and the two begin a 7-week passionate love affair, conceiving a child. The jealous suspecting husband uncovers their secret and shoots the man point-blank. Before dying, the man briefly reviews his seven lives.

All these stories have a basic plot in common. The man (always male pov) lives an average life, minding his own business, not quite fulfilled but not knowing he's missing anything until a chance encounter with a woman, who happens to be his soulmate. She is most often the object of many male gazes and, more often than not, the smile on her lips freezes when he eyes lock with the man's. They both feel like they've met before but can't place when, where, or how, and from that moment on, their very existence hinges on their coming together. Every second apart is torture and the man wilts when he is away from her. However, their [re]union is hindered by numerous obstacles (social classes, prior relational commitments, job demands, etc), and the man dies in an attempt to save the woman from her captors. (Of course, there are some variations to this plot, especially in Adeodatus & Maria's story, but it holds true for the most part.)

Trivia: If you ever wonder how long something lasted or how many items in a unit, guess "7" and you'll be right 99.9% of the time.

What is love?

So my plan of posting after each reading didn't work as I had anticipated it to, due to family problems these past two weeks. After a couple of plane rides, hospital visits, and nights spent alone in a huge house, I think we may be on track. So here we go.

Rebreanu's Adam and Eve is unlike anything I've read before, especially compared to his two previous novels, Ion and Forest of the Hanged. This novel's plotline is a male soul seeking its female soulmate throughout seven lives lived on earth from ancient India to modern (early 20th century) Romania. Imbued with Eastern philosophy, Adam and Eve offers a delectable science-fiction love story that spans several lives and characters yet maintains the same "essence." Theoretically, a "spiritual atom" that looses its balance must split into two souls (man and woman) which live material lives and try to find each other "in order to reset the balance" (14). According to the novel's premise, "The man and woman seek each other out in the immense turmoil of human life. A man among millions of men years for only one woman out of millions of women. One man alone and one woman alone[;] no one else. Adam and Eve seeking each other out unconsciously and irresistibly. This is the raison d'etre of man's life. [...] The instinct of love is the reminiscence of divine origin. Love alone can unite the soul of a man to the soul of a woman to make them again part of the spiritual world. This love is the divine fruit of the human soul. God is the image of love in man" (15).

I find this idea quite interesting, especially when contrasted with C. S. Lewis's take on human love as it reflects divinity. In The Great Divorce, Lewis writes: "There's something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. [...] Someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you [humans] this many a year: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country [heaven]: but none will rise again until it has been buried. [...] There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels" (104-106).

Two lengthy quotes, I know. But the contrast between the two is amazing, is it not? In Rebreanu, love is the very essence of a person's being, and a person must find his or her soulmate in order to reset an intricate balance. But the problem with this philosophy is that it begins and ends with humans. Say Rebreanu's philosophy (as espoused in this novel) is true--what happens once the soul reaches equilibrium? To what end its existence? Lewis intervenes at this point and adds that natural affection--though beautiful and necessary--is only good when it is found in God, flows from Him, and is returned to Him.

I don't know if this makes sense to my readers, but for me, the contrast between Rebreanu and Lewis couldn't be more enlightening.

Adam and Eve... take 7

I'm going to try something new and post as I go! Yes, the inovative idea is actually to post a couple small sections a day or every other day rather than a big fat post at the end. My biggest challenge will be trying to stay within a 100-150 word range per post, but with that kind of a limit (and knowing it won't take me an hour like my other posts do), I'll be more likely to post more frequently. (Or so I'm trying to convince myself.)

So, I've started reading Adam and Eve (Rebreanu) today. I didn't make it past the foreword, though, because there was so much excellent content in that short essay. So I thought my very first post on the book would be from there.

"Liviu Rebreanu is today rightly considered to be the greatest of all Romanian novelists. His writings (novels, short stories, drama, dramatic criticism, essays, lectures, etc.) were composed between 1908–1944, a career at its highest in the thirties, the period that marked the flourishing of modern Romanian fiction with the works of M. Sadoveanu, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, Camil Petrescu, Mateiu I. Caragiale, Mircea Eliade, Gib Mihaescu, Cezar Petrescu, and others alongside Liviu Rebreanu. Between the two world wars, this distinguished group of writers extremely diverse in individuality and originality achieved (in the novel, above all) a synchronization with new narrative forms, sometimes parallel with the esthetic experiments of Proust, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, W. Faulkner, Franz Kafka, at other times anticipating the visions of the French existentialist novel. Liviu Rebreanu holds a central position in the movement for the renewal of Romanian fiction after the first world war, not only by making a stand against the outdated romanticism of 1900, but also by his faithfulness to a classical tradition adapted to modernism refusing, however, the avant-garde experimentalism. […]

"Rebreanu stands out as an exponent of the tendency to synchronize tradition and modernism, a premise to a ‘new classicism’ in Romanian literature in the years before the Second World War.

"[…Rebreanu preferred] the broad projects of epic and dramatic structures, he was for inner tension and rhythm ‘without which no novel however valuable it may be, can captivate its readers.’ […]

"From his very first short stories, Rebreanu brought an unusual manly vigor, a tough and somber vision of reality. He refused any stylization of chromaticism and reintroduced into fiction the naturalistic observation of human life. He brought back, as one of his most profound commentators, Tudor Vianu, put it, the underdog and his precarious social condition. Furthermore, from the very beginning, he projected his ‘naturalism’ on to a cosmic backdrop, the earthly plane having acquired transcendental significance. That is how the young writer handled his short story masterpieces […] in which rugged human beings animated by hazy aspirations are caught in the web of dramatic conflicts leading, more often than not, to tragic endings or only to confrontation with the great issues of life. […]

"The innermost movement of Rebreanu’s prose—analogous with the European trend—is to make a study of the social reality; to analyze the individual case in relationship to the study of the collective destiny; that is, from case history to diagnosis." (Mircea Zaciu)

I know that’s a mouthful, but I couldn’t have said it better than Zaciu himself. Concerning Adam and Eve, Zaciu explains that the novel consists of a seven short stories, all portraying the life of a couple, revealing in the end that sensuous love is "the unique vital principle" in life.

It appears Rebreanu himself preferred this novel about the rest, as revealed in a quote included in the forward: "of all the books I have written so far, Adam and Eve is the one I like best. Maybe because in it there is more hope if not even a certain kind of comfort, because in it man’s life is beyond an earthly beginning and end, and finally because Adam and Eve is a book of eternal illusions."

So there you have it: a critical introduction to Rebreanu’s authoritative word on love. This will be interesting…