Ramona Mihăilă: Doina Ruști, you are the author of several successful novels, many of them awarded literary prizes and translated into other languages. Where does your impulse to write come from? Is it a kind of genetic inheritance, or rather an intellectual choice?
Doina Ruști: In my life there have been many stages in which “something” motivated my narrative expression. Of the three traditional modes of literary expression, the epic fascinated me from the very beginning. Any question I heard immediately triggered a sequence of events in my mind, moving toward a climax followed by a resolution. Because of this, it never occurred to me to answer anyone in monosyllables.
My mother sometimes advised me not to give so many details, especially to strangers who only asked about the location of a street. But her insistence on caution always seemed absurd to me. How could anyone possibly harm me simply by learning that on that street there once lived a butcher who wore gold rings brought from the Turks? Especially since that butcher had already died!
And yet my mother had her own kind of wisdom. But to return to your question: there were many “somethings” that fed my epic impulse. There have indeed been writers in my family, but I don’t consider that particularly important. Characters may be inherited, but literary talent is never transmitted in pure form—it always comes together with other traits.
My father wrote poetry, for instance. My mother loved to tell stories. My paternal grandmother published a monograph. My grandfather wrote memoirs about his time in a Russian labor camp, though he later destroyed them because he did not want to share what he had lived through. Still, one autumn day, a year before he died, he told me a story so devastating that even now I feel it like a steel screw in my left ventricle.
My great-grandfather wrote pedagogical texts, and his father, a blacksmith with intellectual ambitions, used to note down important events in a ledger.
But my impulse to write did not come from blood. Every time I write a story, I feel such happiness that nothing happening in the real world can rival that feeling. Perhaps only the sincere and passionate words of a man in love.
Ramona Mihăilă: Your novel Lizoanca at the Age of Eleven, a book about the fate of a child in contemporary Romania, has been translated into German. When does the promotion for the novel begin?
Doina Ruști: In March I will be invited to the International Book Fair in Leipzig and to Berlin, where I will give several readings and participate in meetings dedicated to this novel, which has recently appeared in German at Horlemann Verlag in Berlin.
Ramona Mihăilă: The novel received the Romanian Academy Prize. In fact, you have received all three major literary awards: the Writers’ Union Prize, the Bucharest Writers’ Association Prize, and the Romanian Academy Prize. What importance do literary awards have for you?
Doina Ruști: Awards strengthen one’s self-respect, especially when they are granted to books that have been fiercely criticized. The Academy Prize was awarded to Lizoanca, a novel about a Romanian village and the small, bitter secrets of a community that has lost its trust in history.
Because the subject was inspired by a real case that received intense media attention in Romania—the story of an eleven-year-old girl accused of prostitution—the novel sparked many controversies when it appeared. It was both praised and condemned in excess.
The book became a bestseller and is currently being adapted for film. Besides the German edition, it is also scheduled to appear with publishers in Italy and Spain.
Under these circumstances, the Romanian Academy Prize came at a favorable moment for me, finally putting an end to a long polemic, as if people had finally accepted that Romania also has this problem—child prostitution—among many others.
Ramona Mihăilă: Your female characters are extremely diverse. Laura Iosa (The Little Red Man) combines irony, humor and refined intelligence, as a critic in La Stampa once wrote. Lizoanca is a child with a strong personality. Adela (The Ghost in the Mill) has an investigative and imaginative mind. Licia (Four Men Plus Aurelius) is a killer of unsettling innocence. Which of your female characters is closest to your heart?
Doina Ruști: The most recent character is always closest to my heart. Li Zeta, the singer in my novel Mămica la două albăstrele, recently published by Polirom, moves me deeply. She reminds me of those pure ideals in which people continue to believe even when values seem to collapse everywhere, as happens in our present time.
Li Zeta ignores this chaotic reality and continues to believe in a life without compromises. In many ways that expresses me quite well. I cannot say that I have never made compromises in my life. But whenever I did, everything turned to dust. It never helped in any way. The discomfort was so strong that for a long time afterward I felt completely drained.
That does not mean there are not worse things. I have also made many foolish decisions in the name of principles that I later abandoned. But the character in Mămica la două albăstrele preserves her purity even under the threat of our recent history, where laws change from one day to another, leaders multiply like the magic bean in fairy tales, and the most atrocious criminal can become the center of public admiration.
Yet for many people all of this may still sound like a love poem.
Ramona Mihăilă: Speaking of poems, have you ever written poetry? What do you think of it as a form of expression?
Doina Ruști: I have written only one poem, and that was when I was already an adult. To me, poetry seems the most subtle and trembling way of begging for the love of others. I prefer to ask for it directly—through the novel. It is a structure within which I feel very well protected.
An interview on Academic platform GALE )
