From Cold War to War On Terror – a personal journey
January 9th, 2009Ears by Lehel Vandor is a memoir freshly published by Legend Press in the United Kingdom.
It is a personal journey of a Transylvanian Hungarian ethnic child of Ceausescu’s dark `70s, a teenager during the suffocating Romanian `80s, a student during the surreal `90s and an emigrant of recent years.
His journey from a world that Kafka imagined, but Ceausescu created, to a society that still fights with numerous ghosts also reveals unexpected parallels between that past totalitarianism and the disturbing transformations of his recently adopted home.
It combines the recollections of a child’s personal experiences with the subtle humour of the reminiscing adult, genuine literary craftsmanship, a gentle lyrical tone of remarkable restraint even when writing about everyday experiences one can’t even imagine to live through once.
On the other hand, it is not just a memoir of years spent during an infamous totalitarian regime – it is also a sensitive and deeply observant description of the many unexpectedly dark changes that came after the optimism that followed the Romanian Revolution of 1989.
It is a tableau of a society going through the most disorienting tectonic shifts, seen from `street level’ and in the final chapters there are revelatory parallels drawn between the author’s former and his later adopted home.
Whether the dumbing down and exquisite propaganda tactics are used by a communist dictator or, years and miles apart, a free democratic country’s government seeing itself in the second line of a so-called `War on Terror’, it becomes evident: the context and details may differ in certain methods used by radically different powers, but the essence and intent of those classic methods can be remarkably similar.
It also gives the reader the opportunity to follow the cognitive journey of a person who gradually discovers the shadier side of the things everybody craved during the communist regime: the wonders of consumerism, the apparent total freedom of speech and press, freedom of thought being streamlined into few narrow mainstream trends…
ISBN-13: 978-1849231589, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other major book retailers.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:34 am
This intelligent description of Lehel Vandor’s recent memoir makes me want to read the book straight away. It sounds as if memoir is used as a starting point for the discussion of philosophical issues – just the sort of book I feel at home with!
January 10th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Happen to have acquired a copy from Amazon, noticed it while I was looking for The Whisperers, which is amazing book of recollections from Stalin’s era. Ears strike me as indeed more than a memoir- it does read mostly as a very touching memoir but then last few chapters, after having discussed the very changed Romania and then the author’s new home (the UK), it blows open into a vivid discussion of parallels I myself have not thought about… between different shades of political manipulations, dumbing down, cult of paranoia etc. It seems having the eyes of a person that lived through daily brainwashing attempts does help to spot things we would just walk past by in our ‘free’ daily lives.