The Censor's Notebook
A Novel
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A fascinating narrative of life in communist Romania, and a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of literature and censorship.
Winner of the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize
A Censor’s Notebook is a window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, steeped in mystery and secrets and lies, confirming the power of literature to capture personal and political truths.
The novel begins with a seemingly non-fiction frame story—an exchange of letters between the author and Emilia Codrescu, the female chief of the Secret Documents Office in Romania’s feared State Directorate of Media and Printing, the government branch responsible for censorship. Codrescu had been responsible for the burning and shredding of the censors’ notebooks and the state secrets in them, but prior to fleeing the country in 1974 she had stolen one of these notebooks.
Now, forty years later, she makes the notebook available to Liliana, the character of the author, for the newly instituted Museum of Communism. The work of a censor—a job about which it is forbidden to talk—is revealed in this notebook, which discloses the structures of this mysterious institution and describes how these professional readers and ideological error hunters are burdened with hundreds of manuscripts, strict deadlines, and threatening penalties. The censors lose their identity, and are often frazzled by neuroses and other illnesses.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Corobca frames her hilarious and poignant English-language debut as a series of letters regarding a notebook kept over the course of five months in 1974 by a Romanian bureaucrat. A fictional Liliana Corobca specializes in censorship at the Museum of Communism, where she acquires Filoftiea Moldovean's notebook from Emilia Codrescu, another official who saved it from destruction, thus providing insights into what a censor thought of their work. What follows in Filoftiea's pages is a chronicle of acerbic, witty opinions of the literature she suppresses, not merely commenting on its subversive qualities but the politics of literature: its aesthetics, production, and relationship to readers. "Some book editors," Filoftiea writes, "are also envious authors and they block their fellow writers, but blame ." In another entry, Filoftiea carps, "not one person's capable of creating an essential book anymore. A book that's necessary." In the hands of a lesser writer, a book composed mostly of complaints by a thoroughly indoctrinated bureaucrat against government-sanctioned samizdat might get old quickly—not so here. Filoftiea's railings are as funny as they are complex, a character study of personal and political repression brimming with sharp observations that say as much about the intellectual mechanics of an authoritarian state as they do the ways readers and texts work upon one another. Even a censor would have to agree this makes for essential reading.
