Sunday on Monday

How I Spent My Sunday is up at Night Train. It's a short one.

Ten Facts About Vatra Dornei

1. Vatra Dornei is a town set at a point where two rivers meet in the Bucovina region of Northern Romania, where the Carpathian mountains also meet the border with Ukraine.



2. What Vatra Dornei does not have: Internet Cafes, Mobile Phone Centers, Starbucks, IMAX, Ihop, Istore, I-anything.



3. You will never starve in August in Vatra Dornei. There are apples everywhere and the pavements are made of cheese.



4. Vatra Dornei, like much of Bucovina, is regularly visited by clouds in summer. They creep around the mountains and hug the streets.




5. Lordini's restaurant in Vatra Dornei do an excellent tuna, garlic and mushroom pizza. It costs about one dollar.

6. Vatra Dornei is full of roosters. No alarm clock required.

7. Vatra Dornei has natural spring water. You can walk into the central park anytime and collect it in a bottle. The park is also full of squirrels.



8. Everyone in Vatra Dornei and Bucovina fills every available space with flowers.




9. Vatra Dornei once had a thriving population of Jews, Germans, Ukranians and Romanians. There is a Jewish cemetary deep in a forest on the hillside.




10. The Workers Syndicate Hotel in Vatra Dornei, where we stayed, is highly recommended. It is bright orange and visible from all the surrounding hills.

Falling off the edge of the network

We're catching the night train from Bucharest to Bucovina today. Bucovina is in the north of Romania, where the Carpathians curve away into Ukraine. According to the guidebook the place is a "...magical realm teeming with legends, trolls, giant mushrooms and invisible spiders. Here there no internet be but bears do in abundance. Bring meat and a gun."

We are sadly unable to bring our dog with us, so we're leaving her at a care home for dogs here in Bucharest. The regime seems strict but the French owners assure us that the dog will be very disciplined when we return:



Back on the 26th, we hope.

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd, the London seer, cockney rebel and analyst of cross-dressing trends, has a disturbing tendency to associate land with intention. In his novels and histories of London and England, he often refers to the land as 'working through' its people and usually in a less-than-nice way, as with the murderers of London for example: they didn't do it, the city did. All of this can suggest a highly-unpleasant 'blood and soil' brand of Fascism, lurking under the surface, especially when it comes for example to 'Albion', Ackroyd's "history" of England.

The real story is, I think, more subtle than that. Ackroyd is playing with notions of truth and make-believe. This dynamic motivates the cross-dresser as much as it does the novelist. His histories mix fact with suggestion in a way that is both compelling and repelling. Fictions are seductive, troublesome and dangerous, but there is no getting away from them. They are as much a part of human life as fact.

I think that Ackroyd is at his strongest when he makes the truth/invention dynamic most explicit in his work - when he shows his hand. It works best when he works with the father/son(daughter) structure. In both "English Music" and "The Fall of Troy" there is a major, dominating father-figure set against a naive, innocent child-figure.

The father-figure is not, as one might expect, the arbiter of truth and justice. Quite the opposite. These characters are fuelled by dangerous fantasies. Experience does not open their eyes to the truth - it only shows them how to exploit it for fantastical ends. 'Herr Oberman" (Uberman) in 'Troy' destroys genuine archaeological evidence in the service of his fantastical claims. Clement Harcombe in 'English Music' is a highly dubious "Medium and Healer".

In a neat act of subversion, Ackroyd deploys the children as the rational truth finders. In 'Troy', Sophia (a clear stand-in for a 'daughter' figure) can literally see right through Oberman's lies. Yet, being child-like, she remains in thrall with the daemonic father figure. Similarly, Tim Harcombe in 'English Music' tries to escape his father by slipping into artistic vision.

I believe that these oppressive, anti-rational father figures stand in for the 'land' in Ackroyd's histories. They are both everywhere and inescapable. We are fatally in thrall with them even while understanding the trick of it. And that is ultimately what any novelist would want.

John Cheever's 'Reunion'

It's less than a thousand words long but it packs a wallop that resonates down through the years. It's one of the best shorts I have ever read. Actually, the first time I didn't read it. I heard it, as a New Yorker podcast. I thought it a little over-warmed that time - a whisky soaked relic from the fifties. I have since learned that listening is the poor relation of reading. Listening with pictures though, after first listening, then reading, is a heartening experience...

The story is a basic one. Charlie has a meeting with his father. The real entertainment comes from the behaviour and attitudes of the father. He seems hell bent on using irony and disdain to prove some far off distant point that no one can quite seem to grasp, least of all him. He shouts a lot, is sarcastic and boorish. In some ways he is hilarious company, in others, a monster. The behaviour might be the result of drunkeness, but it also seems more than that. There seems to be a keen misanthropy deep under the surface, yet there is also a sense of joy that the father has in getting 'a rise' out of people - almost as if he is trying to wake the sleeping world. I love this idea - a character trying to break some kind of social seal with wonder and hard irony: "I have a whistle that is audible only to the ears of old waiters".

The brilliance of the story is that none of these motivations and behaviours outweighs the others. The father is a perfectly balanced enigma - and so, naturally, is the son. Charlie is the counterpoint to this father in that he is quiet while the father is loud. But he is no less enigmatic for that. The story is framed by the key phrase 'The last time I saw my father...' but Charlie never says why. He doesn't comment on his father's behaviour at all - he merely describes it. The only active thing he does is state that he has to catch his train - but is this true or is he just trying to escape the situation? He doesn't say. It might even be that Charlie is the devil - making all this up about his father, or maybe even provoking the behaviour. It is all possible.



I was prompted into revisiting 'Reunion' after reading Brian Baise's "It's Nice When Someone Is Excited To Hear From You" in McSweeney's 29. That story also features a narrator who drinks and acts outrageously but not without reason. Again there is that sense of someone trying to break the bounds of society - trying to show the world something. There is little explanation of the motives, but a lot of description. It was only until I got to the end and read "...that was the last time I went to San Fransisco or saw my old friend Paul" that I suddenly realised this was all Cheever. The key idea was Cheever's - the POV had been switched to that of the perpetrator and the action was updated to San Francisco.

There's a rich seam here, and I'm starting to mine it.