A book of atmosphere, where the protagonists’ world clogs from details of scenery, psychological nuances and body sensations. And what surprises in Anca Maria Mosora’s writing is her ability of converting perceptions and sensations into presentiments and memories.
Anca Maria Mosora does not describe events; she filters emotions, but she lends them a tone of premonition and a touch of nostalgia.This is why the central caracter of the book is like a passive creature allowed by the events rolling over her to grasp their grave and overwhelming echo.
Hence the sensation of an irremediably melancholic world, where everything happens in slow motion. The dramas, yearnings and loves that burst in this book have something of the grave and refined slowliness of the characters that not only sense their end, but seem to knowingly go towards it.
The spell of the book consists of the psychological hallo that the author, writing at first person, gives to a world she alone knows weather she really lived or entirely imagined.
Press release
Too singular to be related to any system for measuring value, too well written to be relegated amongst oddities, the debut of the prose writer from Humanitas says something about her generation even within the vast space of a silence. Absent from the orientation the rest of her generation displays towards the present, uninterested in their very vocal desperation, Anca Maria Mosora discreetly draws attention to an angle of the fugue, a “dead” angle in which salvation might be awaited. With Archangels do not die, it may be that we have a “non-fabulist treatment” of our anxieties.
(Tania RADU, 22 magazine/ Year XV (826) (3 January 2006 - 9 January 2006)
Anca Maria Mosora is a connoisseur of the disorientations of the sentence, a creator, sophisticated far beyond her years, of psychological and atmospheric moments, for whom a memory imprinted where it ought to be can give birth to worlds according to her image and likeness.
(Marius MIHEŢ, Familia - No. 1 (482) January 2006)
Anca Maria Mosora projects a decadent sensibility onto places, years and people, investing the narrator with the capacity, rare in this day and age, of capturing the poetry of old objects that are dying slowly, implacably, the separate life of streets and buildings, respiring the atmosphere of other epochs, the mystery that the biographies of old people chastely conceal. The gaze that embraces this old world evokes the symbolist prose of D.Anghel and of Macedonski, the melancholy of characters in Ionel Teodoreanu, the poetry of the moth-eaten house in Calinescu, but also the strangeness of E.A. Poe, of Huysmans, of Michel de Ghelderode or André Pierre de Mandiargues. Almost every page is impregnated with the discreet poetry of animated extinction.
(Bianca BURTA-CERNAT, Observatorul cultural)
Excerpt
One night he knocked on my door. I had come home tired, thrown my shoes in the cold and dark hall of the ground floor apartment, filled the tub with water, poured half a bottle of bath foam and was looking forward to sink in its softness when I felt my heart beat faster, my blood rush to my cheeks and my hands tremble unnaturally. I opened the door before he even had a chance to reach out for the bell. He entered as if he had been gone for only an hour, lit a cigarette, sitting in the armchair that completely embraced him and took off his watch, as he always did when he started studying. I could hear its tick-tack echoing in the table, counting the seconds that passed. In a way I had been expecting him, because he always came back to me. In his universe lacking straight lines I was a kind of a dot where everything intersected in a steadfastness that sometimes frightened me. When his roads became hard to follow, he would come, stay for a while in silence, letting me talk to him, give him back the lost time, then he would leave.
First time I thought he wouldn’t come back. After two months during which I knew nothing about him, he appeared out of the blue. He was waiting for me in front of the faculty, with his cello hung on his back. We walked in Cismigiu, had lunch in an outdoor restaurant, then he left again.
He sat, legs crossed, not saying a word. I could hear the water in the bathroom rise, swelling the generously poured foam with every drop, and, in the background, the tick-tack that gave our silence a more and more precise outline. He didn’t dare look at me, but he had taken my hand in his and looked at it from a memory. Then he told me about Alexandra. He was going away again in a few days. He hadn’t been sure wether I still lived there. He had first tried to find me at my faculty. He wanted me to meet her. I got up, I disappeared in the bathroom, turned off the water, then I made coffee, I poured it into the cup we had bought together and brought it to him. He hadn’t moved from the chair and I can’t bring myself to remember wether in all that time he had told me anything else or had been lost in a numbness I hardly recognized him in.
The light fell on his face every time differently, as if I had seen him at different intervals. It settled on his neck, down there, where he leaned his cello. I imagined myself creeping through there, going under his skin and colouring him in every colour he would have wanted to feel me with. Through the gap between his key bones I would have crept, I would have slipped gently, first in his lungs, letting him breathe me at will, now slowly, then quickly, I would have let him suffocate a few times, cough me, and then, among his tense muscles, got into his heart, pushed the blood through every artery and received him through aortas, spread into his whole body, map-making each surface and come back. From the heart I would have passed through into the diafragm, would have made him hickup me to tears and then I would have descended into his stomach, been his only food. Then I would have hung myself from his backbone and gone into his marrow. He, keeping silence, and I, swimming in him, up and down.
From the door, light changes and makes him become sharp, ballanced. A fight follows. If he had laid on his back, his head leaning against me, I would have spoken to him in our language. Only he and I could understand it. And, like every language on earth, it had a history of itself, which I would have whispered into his ear that night. I would have caressed him in our language. I would have brought him into the world. I would have given birth to him in screams of ectasy, as no one was born in this world. Let him bear the signs of the house I was to him. Let him know that he comes from me and he can come back to me from anywhere. The world has changed, the walls are dark, and he was born. There, in the armchair, he was born. In the darkness, because if I had seen him, I would have devoured him. I would have grabbed him with the hands I pulled him from me and I would have engulfed him to the last drop, just to give birth to him once again. He was still silent and his eyes were clear. He probably forgot I was standing in front of him and I had just given birth to him, the only fruit of my womb.
He suspected nothing, felt nothing, he just sat and rarely said anything. Justifications I didn’t hear and served nobody. He was going to inhabit me forever and I was going to endlessly try to abort him, to throw him away from me, with no success though. He was well guarded behind the silence he displayed, and the rest of the evening slipped away between his words and my deliveries.
