Theme:  Eastern Europe

Back to the theme of Eastern Europe we go.  I want to insert a tiny disclaimer here, in accordance with the new blogging rules by the FTC, I did receive a free copy of this book.  I received a free copy so that I could review it which is what the following set of words are...a review.  I did not receive a Boze radio, brand new 2010 Vespa, a new printer because my old one broke, a year supply of French roast coffee or a new bookcase.

This debut novel by Romanian writer, Filip Florian, is a novel that begins with children discovering a mass grave while they are out playing.  Set in a small Romanian town post-Communism, Little Fingers is a mystery with no answer.  This is a novel I expected would engage me, leaving me waiting for more of his work to be translated into English.  It did engage me, and I do want see more, but definitely not in the way that I thought it would.  There is a lack of focus and unsettling digressive narrative turns that make for a convoluted story.  I am still wondering what to make of it.  It seems like there is a protagonist, but by the end of the novel, you can barely remember anything about him. 

Petrus is the main character, at least the character we are led to believe might be a constant, who is the key to all that unravels throughout the novel.  His Auntie Paulina is the eccentric he visits and listens her to as she spins unrelated stories about herself and others.There's her friend, Eugenia Embury, who reads cards and whom Petrus also visits and listens to while he falls in love with her granddaughter, Jojo.  Characters are introduced and stories told, but we aren't given anything to grab onto instead floating on the subtle waves of Florian's prose.  This is what is so confounding about Little Fingers, just when you think that the story has been laid out and is going somewhere, another one starts.  There is tremendous imagination in use when he recounts dreams of Petrus,  when he describes the oldest man in the town and when he recounts the story of Father Onufrie. The stories of the people introduced go on too long and only a few seem to converge towards the end of the novel. 

The town calls in five Argentinian archaeologists who have experience with mass graves to aid in discovering what was the cause of this  tragedy.  There is a long history about the Argentinian mass graves that is compelling and gives us much more than the mass grave that we are introduced to originally and made to wonder if this was a result of Communist abuse.  There is the mystery of who is stealing the bones of the little fingers from the grave site.

But there is rarely the feeling of tragedy to this tragedy.  As a reader, at some point, needs to feel that there is a sense of tragedy along with 'a horrific incident'.  Perhaps there is point to this-if a tragedy like this was allowed to take place, there were those who had to look the other way and ignore the tragedy.  As reader, we are left to look at history the way many people read about tragedies in history-from a book, far removed from the devastation of the incident.  And it is only those who lived through it who can relay the true appalling nature of tragedy.  Maybe that is why Petrus spends time introducing many of the older characters and letting them wander through the narrative dispersing facts that at some point may matter.  But for the reader, it's too difficult to discern what is important and what is 'color; so to speak.  This quote from Petrus is strangely indicative of how Florian gives us the story:

Later, when it was barely half past eight,  realized something unusual:  I was continually looking at the clock.  Not one of the books on the nightstand tempted me.  Reviewing my observations in my notebook was useless.  At one point I turned on the radio, and quickly turned it off.  I put some clothes in the water to soak, but did not get around to washing them.  I went out into the yard with a rug.  The sun was burning, quite brightly and after scorching my back for a little while, it made me want something:  a cold shower.  In the cupboard I had plenty of food, but I did not touch it, so as to arouse my hunger as much as possible before experiencing the culinary abilities of the oldest man in town.