Going back to one’s beginnings is not necessarily a return to paradise, and the narrator in A Ramshackle Home does not return to a prelapsarian world of happy peasants. The garden of her grandmother’s house is in ruins, the house dilapidated, the village poor and depopulated. Her son is allowed to grow wild as she loses interest in life.

When my sister and I visited my father’s ancestral village in Romania, I was filled with curiosity and relief, rather than loathing or shame, unlike Mihali’s heroine, who admits that she was “always loath to acknowledge [her] origins.”

Curious to know how my grandparents had lived before they emigrated to Canada, and relieved that I hadn’t been born there myself, I liked the thought of having a peasant past. Context and historical reality, though, is everything. Mihali’s heroine grew up in Communist Romania which, as the novel implicitly makes clear, was no earthly paradise. Moreover, as an intellectual female, rather than a party follower, her choices were restricted, possibly forbidden. 

When her lover George brings her loads of books, a veritable library of classic Western literature for the most part, from Homer to Beckett, however improbable that may sound, she spends a winter immersed in reading and offering us snippets of literary criticism of the books she devoured. Although the chapter is narratively overextended, it nonetheless tells the reader that this is a woman with a mind—a woman with a mind in communist Romania who doesn’t spout the party line, but feels incomplete and psychologically imprisoned.

With so many shortcomings, how would I ever manage to become a normal and complete person? I felt like one of those hybrids conceived in a test tube, lacking the essential elements to be called a human being. I was blind, deaf and mute, and that was no doubt the secret reason for all my failures.

Although born during the communist regime well after the forced abdication of King Michael, she 

…felt an affinity for those that preceded my parents’ generation: the former aristocrats of the village, the religious royalists, born during or after the Great War, who used to sleep in long cotton nightshirts stitched with red and black thread.

In the mid-fifties, my mother helped a young woman recently arrived from Romania, get settled in Canada. Around the supper table, she spoke about her difficult life in her native village and the lack of opportunity and the family she had to leave behind. To express her gratitude, she gave my mother, two embroidered nightshirts, which I still own, having never worn them. At the risk of idealizing her peasant grandparents, who “perspired like saints,” our heroine nonetheless recognizes their human physicality and soul, corroded by the communist regime: 

I believe the sour smell of sweat originated with collective farming, with the transport of workers in open trucks to their place of work where their faces were covered with dust … who drank themselves to death on cheap alcohol spiked with ethanol.  Even diseases of her parents’ generation are worse under the communists: Women …were plagued with vaginal discharge; afflicted with rheumatism, they would suffer from swelling or bowing of the legs when they walked. Men grappled with hemorrhoids, hernias, arthritis, and sometimes tuberculosis. … They almost never went to church …. Celebrating mass terrified them. 

Despite sometimes debilitating sessions in the slough of despond, she undertakes to repair and clean the old house and restore the gardens, like Crusoe building his shelter and finding food. 

The changes were visible. They aroused a sense of euphoria in me and gave an appetite for work. 

True, this doesn’t remain a permanent condition, even if she thanks her peasant origins for the ability to do so before collapsing again: 

I was finally learning what an advantage it was to have a peasant background. I realized that I would survive, no matter what. I was not going to die of starvation or despair. I knew how to adapt to any situation, even the most inhospitable conditions.

She re-establishes a connection with George Popescu, a childhood friend in the village town, shocked by changes time hath wrought. They become lovers and Mihali doesn’t hesitate to describe physical sensations to avoid romanticizing, and to be true to the sense of decay, dissatisfaction and collapse that permeates the novel. The narrator’s powerful imagination creates fantasy scenarios that help endure the brutal facts of her physical and mental existence: 

During the harsh winter, a prisoner of the snow, wind, and frost, I constructed a sunny story redolent of oranges, a story that would unfold on the shores of Asia Minor. The Trojan War was about to break out in my mind. I had awoken to an apocalyptic atmosphere, just as the legendary civilization was being threatened by the Greeks. 

Casting herself in the role of Zenaida, one of Priam’s daughters enslaved by Achilles, she concocts a powerful alternative history in which she reveals her complex and contradictory psychology and desires, and which also remind me of the current trend of writing mythological stories from a female perspective: e.g. Circe by Madeleine Miller, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.

This mythologizing, if you will, extends to her own family as far back as her great-grandmother, whose history of outrages fascinates and, to some degree, inspires her. And it underlines her relentless desire not to sugar-coat, not to slip into a realm of idealized romance, which her own failed marriage, the collapse of her dreams, the violence of her imagination, the frustration of her intellectual life and the suffocating communist regime rendered impossible in any case.

More than anything, I loved the story of my great-grandmother, as my grandmother had begun to tell it, and as Aunt Cecilia had finished it. I loved it because it was a story in which a man’s love becomes deadly, in which the woman puts up no resistance, in which she can only suffer flagellation and persecution, even though they are motivated by love. In all these stories, the odour of sperm merged with the odour of animals and sour male sweat. There was nothing but pain and copulation. Men and women with no room for beauty, tenderness, or friendship between them. 

Given the last month or two of our heroine’s residence in the village, and a startling turn of events which I will not reveal here, A Ramshackle Home is aptly entitled. Originally written in Romanian, the gifted Felicia Mihali translated her first novel into French under the title Le Pays du fromage (XYZ Éditeur, 2002)—a  title explained in the novel—and which in turn has been fearlessly translated into English by the award-winning Judith Weisz Woodsworth. Given the audacity and frankness of the novel, also the many passages of physical exactitude Woodsworth’s translation is a major achievement.

[Photos courtesy of the author]

Kenneth Radu has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry. A two-time recipient of the Quebec Writers' Federation award for English-language fiction, his latest book, Net Worth, is published by DC Books Canada. He is currently revising the manuscript of a collection of linked stories.   [Photo of the author by Joshua Radu]