The novel The Last Winter by Adrian Grigore superimposes the fiction over the reality from a very difficult period in Romania: the long and hard transition from the communist totalitarian regime of Ceausescu, to a fragile democracy with many syncope. That time many valuable Romanian researchers emigrated to western countries, in search of a better life. The Last Winter book is dedicated, to all the researchers from the world: “To my friends, the researchers.”, as the author
mentions on the first page of the book. The trigger that led the author to write this book was an unfortunate incident happened in January 2003 in a very important scientific library from Romania, which was in an improper building, that in the book is called Tower B. The heating system was interrupted by negligence, the library had been flooded because of some broken water pipes and then the frost came. The author shot some incredible pictures, with books covered by ice and with icicles hanging from the shelves, but the recording was immediately confiscated, and he was threatened by some very important persons. The politicians, in charge with the research activity in Romania, that time, were not happy when Adrian Grigore published in May 2003 the novel Ultima Iarnă (The Last Winter) at the Albatros Publishing House in Bucharest (ISBN 973-24-0995-9).
The author had the chance to meet a Lady named Viviane Prager who really liked the novel and who offered to translate into English almost for free. Mrs. Prager was a true revolutionary and had even been arrested and taken to Jilava prison during the anti-communist uprising in Bucharest on December 21-22, 1989. She put a lot of passion and skill into the translation of the novel The Last Winter and managed to make a translation appreciated by many native Americans. She died, but the author Adrian Grigore keeps her memory alive through this book.
“The Last Winter describes the agony of an annonin researcher and, broadly peaking, of the all-honest Romanian intelligentsia, in the muddled period that followed the overturn of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship in late 1989. The deprivations that politicians imposed on the Romanian public for the sake of an ambivalent switch to market economy and delusive future welfare took a serious toll on the country. The lead character found himself caught between two ostensibly different worlds but that hardly differed in reality, insofar as they were products of the same clique of politicians that only paid lip service to Eastern Europe’s political U-turn of the 1990s. Persecuted under the Communist regime, the character has trouble adjusting to the mock capitalism that follows.” (Viviane Prager)
The narrative “wraps” around Tower B – the pillar of scientific information, “crowned” with an emblematic giant atom, once the proud expression of Romanian scientific research. Driven by an older childish desire to touch this huge atom – exacerbating the essence of the material world – the Researcher sneaks into Tower B, that is shrouded by a harsh winter.
He slips on the ice from the library stairs, and hits his head very hard. In the agony that follows, he oscillates between two different worlds: the contemporary world troubled by a miserable existence, that is no longer interested in libraries and leaves them in ruins, and the ancient world of the Nineveh city, that has a very valuable library with cuneiform writing on burnt clay tablets, and that is threatened with destruction due to a bloody war with the Babylonians. Is a self-denying struggle for preserving the fundamental values of mankind embodied by the endangered library – that of his own research institute and its symbolic counterpart, King Assurbanipal’s famous library in Nineveh.
In the last moments of his life, the anonymous researcher manages to, imaginary, save in his mind the library in Nineveh, but fails to save the scientific library in Tower B. He dies lying on a pile of books, robbed by some beggars, who were looking for various goods in the abandoned library. Therefore, the researcher dies while unsuccessfully trying to save the library of his former research institute but compensates by saving the Library of Ninive, “in his dying hour’s visions-a silver lining to this gloomy ending as the author believes that fundamental values will eventually prevail” (Viviane Prager.)
The Last Winter offers to the reader a deep and careful approach to understanding the condition of the scientist in the times we are going through. The fiction of the novel oscillates between the present time and the time of history. The problematic of the action is projected in the motto that opens the book: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (I Corinthians, 1,20). Corseted by the communist political regime until December 1989, despised and humiliated in the following period, the researcher, engaged in finding the truth, seems anachronistic in a society that manufactures “convenient truths” because the oppressors do not change with the times.
The library – the information treasure of research – triggers, due to the researcher’s unfortunate injury (he slips on the stairs and hits his head), a real initiatory journey of the main character in search of the Truth. He traverses the ages, from ancient Nineveh to the present day, entering and exiting time, as in the waters of parallel mirrors, according to moments of fainting or returning to diurnal reality; it warps or clears according to subjective time markers. The contact with the immanent reality is maintained by the presence of the tomcat Isaac – discreet witness of History. The planes of the narrative intersect, time dilates or contracts in close connection with the affective memory of the main character. Losing contact with the “objective” reality leads, paradoxically, to the penetration into its depth. The initiatory journey in the Assyrian-Babylonian space, which the character of the book undertakes, has as its purpose the saving of information – the ceramic tablets
of the ancient Nineveh library – and, implicitly, finding out the way to know the Truth. If the ancient library is well hidden, secured, so as not to be destroyed by the avatars of history, the library in Tower B – corresponding to the one in Nineveh – is exposed to perishability. The problem of preserving information opens a wide field of reflection. The testimonies of the ages seem to demonstrate that the material support of information storage is more and more vulnerable. Does digitization protect us from this vulnerability?! The author seems to give the answer to this question, indirectly and a little ironically, highlighting the ceramic tablets with cuneiform writing that have lasted almost three millennia. He asks the main character to give his opinion in this regard, when he sees the disaster in his institute’s library: “Everything we’ve got here should be inscribed on tablets. We can’t go on like this.” (see page 151 of the edition 2022, ISBN 978-1-956529-70-8) Obviously, his idea arouses the laughter of those around him.
Information opens the way to knowledge, but is it enough? The truth about Creation involves much more!
The meeting with the “researcher father” and the discussion at the hermitage in the forest opens the researcher’s horizon towards the true way of knowing the Truth – the permission and help of the Creator in the discovery of Creation: “…Knowledge and faith, my friend, can’t go without each other, for you can’t know anything unless you believe.” … “We know nothing except what we are meant to know and would discover nothing unless the One who has created everything allowed us to do so”.” What reason has discovered up to now is just a spark from the huge blaze surrounding us.” (see page 138 and 139 of the editions 2022, ISBN978-1-956529-70-8). The desacralization of scientific knowledge takes us away (paradoxically!) from the Work of the Creator: Researchers of the new age will have to bring back the sacred to science. Otherwise, humanity will stand at a kind of barrier that blocks the way to true knowledge. “We will continue to take pride on moving the barrier a further step away on this great road the end of which we’ll never reach.”
The famous phrase attributed to Malraux seems, in this context, the argument of a revelation: “The 21st century will be religious or not be at all”. The researcher of the new age will have to put “faith before reason and theological virtue before the inquisitive mind.” It is a most arduous path, but the only true one that leads to the essence and meaning of knowledge; without the divine spark, wisdom is madness, as the book’s motto warns us. In addition to real fiction qualities due to the narrative construction in adjacent planes (sometimes difficult to follow for an inexperienced reader) and the fluent style, Adrian Grigore’s book offers the reader an issue that cannot leave him indifferent.
Ioana GRIGORE VARGA – Professor of Literature
Email: gr.ioana@gmail.com
Phone: + 40 723 144 325