Dana Grigorcea

Das primäre Gefühl der Schuldlosigkeit

«Dass ich Flavian von Sjuganow erzählen muß, kann ihm, wohl zu Recht, in diesem musikalischen Zusammenhang unpassend erscheinen, aber irgendwie will die Kulisse selten zu meinen Erzählungen passen, oft falle ich aus der Zeit – und mir wird klar, dass die Zeit, in der ich lebe und gelebt habe, nur ein Abklatsch jener Zeiten ist, die ich mir am besten vorstellen kann.»

Back in Bucharest, her home city, Victoria witnesses a bank robbery and is given leave by her employer to mentally come to terms with the event. But what is initially hailed as a welcome opportunity put away the past and finally sort out the «paper work» – regarding the houses, woods and vineyards returned to the family along with four graves in Bellu cemetery – will come to shake the foundations of Victoria's existence.
Searching for times past, she gradually realises that memory, imagination and reality do not always match up and that perhaps the «original feeling of innocence» of her childhood was only imagined. Hasn't the brutality of the Romanian Ceausescu regime always been lurking behind the tinted film of the images in her memory? The psychologically sensitive novel ultimately careers towards a tragic realisation. It is only now that it dawns on Victoria how her childish delight in making up stories must have led her to betray her own mother.
From the narrative's juxtaposition of different places and timeframes emerges, in the words of the German writer W.G. Sebald, an 'unheimliche Heimat' (uncanny home). Even story-telling only provides a limited remedy. Tearing open old wounds wherever it ventures, the narrative itself is heavy with guilt. The often absurd, surreal quirks of everyday life create the moving tragicomic ambivalence that characterises this complex novel.

(Marc Caduff, trans. by Andrea Willfratt)

Translation of title: An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence

Dörlemann, Zürich 2015

ISBN: 978-3-03820-921-8