Surprise

The August issue of the cultural magazine Arges arrived with yet another beautiful surprise. Special thanks go to Mrs. Simona Fusaru. 

Oana Ninica – Shaorma with ice-cream

Fall down 7, get up 8! (a line from a movie)

Every one of us fights their own battles. From outside, everything seems easy and we sometimes give ourselves hard times for not being able to deliver some things, make true some plans, just as easy as it seems for others, anyway. We have expectations, realistic or not, and they worn us down or their reflection wear us down when we look at ourselves in the mirror and ask about what we did wrong.

‘Shaworma with ice-cream’, Oana Ninica’s book, starts from there – faced with the reflection, after the fall. In hindsight, if you have courage to look, you can analyse what went wrong and you can choose if you are going to struggle some more or if you will give up. Fear is the embedded character, in all pages of the book. It does not do anything, but it is there, you feel it, you know it, you recognise it from the things that happened to you. Sometimes, you laugh at it and at the ridicule of letting yourself get carried away by it; and other times, fear seams a Colossus that laughs at you and your try to measure your strength with it.

 

‘Fear kills. The opposite of fear is not courage, as most would say. The opposite of fear is only the TRUTH.’

 

And at the end, something sublime.

Vlad lives on!

If it were up to me, Vlad’s books would be studied at school and mentioned in the Romanian language and literature handbooks, and also always be present in the bookstores in the section ‘Bookseller's recommendation’. 

But until then, my dear master still keeps on springing in his impish manner. I randomly ordered some books from an old books store, and the surprise of finding his and his wife’s names filled me with a tender joy. Vlad lives on!