About things that really matter (July 2011)

Yeah, that’s actually a book’s title, but it’s a Romanian book, written by Paleologu, called, in the original language “Despre lucrurile cu adevarat importante”.
I know most of you won’t be able to read it or you won’t be able to understand anything, even if you can read Romanian but don’t have a minimum of Romanian culture.
I don’t have much of a culture myself, I guess, so for example I can’t explain who this guy
iswas (thanks, Wikipedia), I just know he wrote books and he was quite present in the TV shows which debated about culture, writers, philosophy, even politics I think (but not sure if he was part of any political party or anything).
To come back to the book, it’s a strangely interesting one, because it’s not a novel, but just a collection of texts about one or more writers, about a critic or things like that. I did not finish it yet, but there were a couple of chapters I liked, especially one about Caragiale.
Ok, so you don’t know who Caragiale is. It’s (for me) one of the major contributors to Romanian literature. You can read some of the facts here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caragiale
He wrote mostly theater – and almost all were comedies, some short stories, and I think that’s basically it. We could say he resembles a bit Moliere’s style… What is very funny (and very well done) in his comedies is the way he describes the society at that era (~1870, says Wikipedia), not only from a political point of view, but also in terms of habits, ways of living, talking, etc. It’s very very funny for someone who can relate to the Romanian people, and a lot of people say his theater is very realistic even for current society, some 150 years later.
What Paleologu defends in a couple of short essays about Caragiale in his book is the idea that comedy/humor is not the basis for a low-level literature. During high school, when I actually had to read a lot of (bad, from my point of view) stuff and all that the critics had to say about it, I was amazed how much critics ‘despised’ humorists. It was simply unbelievable that people would consider laughing something… frivolous, superficial and low-quality, especially in literature. I never understood why a novel should be tragic, very sad and complicated to be very very good. So the fact that this guy defends the quality of Caragiale’s work by saying that literature that has humor at its foundations is not by default low scale and superficial, I actually felt less ignorant
Another thing I liked about this book is that, 20 years later, it got me thinking ‘I would really like to read this novel, and this one, and this one’ – most of which were on my ‘to read’ list in high-school, but I never wanted to read them then. The way he describes what the author wrote about, mixing this with their lives, the things they believed in, the ‘fights’ they had with other writers or poets, puts a context around each writer and book that makes it more interesting, especially since it’s no longer mandatory to read, understand and comment it in big philosophical terms that I did not even understand at that time…
“Atentia acordata lucrurilor neinsemnate se numeste frivolitate. Seriosii (pretinsii seriosi) se sperie de frivolitate, fug de ea ca dracul de tamaie si raman la nivelul cliseelor si platitudinilor grave. Contrariul frivolitatii nu e seriozitatea, contrariul frivolitatii e superficialitatea. [...]Nu exista teme grave si teme superficiale, exista numai privire superficiala si privire patrunzatoare, profunda, indiferent de obiectul ei. Pretinsii seriosi nu au acces la profunzime, si nu stiu sa se amuze. ”