Life Begins on Friday by Ioana Pârvulescu

 

Before I start, a disclaimer. I don't like giving negative reviews. Books are awesome. And the chances are, if enough people are willing to put their time into a book, editing, proof reading, graphic designing, publishing, marketing, and of course writing, then it isn't a bad book. What I am saying when I give a bad review, or a low star rating, is that I didn't like that book, and if you like similar books to me, maybe you won't like it either. This is very true of Life Begins on Friday. Objectively, it isn't badly written. I can see it did what it set out to do. Probably it did this with aplomb, it won the European Union prize for literature after all (and everyone loves the European Union...). But it just really isn't the type of book I enjoy.

Since the fall of communism in Romania Ioana Pârvulescu has been working in literature in one form or another. She teaches Modern Literature at the University of Bucharest, and also has worked at România literară, a literary journal. She produced a pair of non-fiction books on life in 19th century and Interwar Romania, which I believe were very well received. Life Begins on Friday was her first novel, published as Viața începe vineri in 2009, and translated into English by Alistair Ian Blyth in 2016.

iThe novel is set in the last 13 days of 1897, in Bucharest. A man is found unconscious and wearing strange clothes in the forest, and not far away, another man is found dead. The novel follows a collection of characters and hops between view points.

The trouble is, none of the characters are particularly interesting. There is a teenage girl, on the edge of womanhood, her father the well-meaning but poor doctor, a philanderer with a big heart. None of them are original, or even have any depth.

And the plot... slight spoiler alert here, but the confused stranger is a time traveller, from our epoch. This is potentially an intriguing set-up. But it doesn't go anywhere. A man is found, in strange clothes, with a lack of manners, something about him just doesn't seem right, and the other characters...just shrug and get on with their business. There is a mystery of sorts. Who killed the other man, and why? But no one really seems to care. It is ignored for most of the book and quickly wrapped up in a couple of pages at the end, with deductions that are, to put it mildly, a bit of a stretch.

For most of the book, these boring characters just potter slowly through a number of events that have very little bearing on anything. It's all very pleasant. But I just wanted someone to do something, or feel something.

For a lot of the book I puzzled about what Pârvulescu was trying to say. Was she making a point that despite the trappings of their particular era, people through out history are essentially the same, with the same wants and needs? Maybe. But upon reflection, the lack of any kind of depth to any aspect of the book makes me think that it is more likely she isn't saying anything. You can find Jesus in any piece of toast if you look hard enough, but sometimes it's just intended for marmalade. Life Begins on Friday is the literary equivalent of a stroll in the park.

★★☆☆☆