Many countries around the world are now weeks into their lockdown, but literature continues to thrive and is necessarily concerned with the current crisis. In Albania, literary events are moved online whilst booksellers are expected to continue working; in France, a Romanian writer and opponent of the Romanian communist regime sadly passed away from coronavirus. In Tokyo, pandemic literature sees a revival. Read on to find out more!
Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania
There was a moment when it felt like an early April literary dispatch from Albania would just be a chance to mourn the events that I was excited about but that never came to pass. Albania registered its first cases of COVID-19 on March 8 and went into full lockdown less than 48 hours after. That obviously means that for almost the entire duration of March, literary news and activities have been scarce. There was one event that I was sad to see postponed: a panel and discussion to be held on the lost voices of Albanian women writers, something that was long overdue.
That being said, Albanians with a literary inclination have found other ways to remain engaged with their reading lists or interests. Radical Sense is a reading group that meets weekly in Tirana to read and discuss radical leftist texts at 28 November, a versatile bookstore/safe space for readers and activists, among its many other uses. Although the physicality of the charming attic where these discussions are held is sacred to the group, participants have taken a page from universities and workplaces across the globe and have just held their first online book club meeting through Zoom. Readings and discussion happen in English, so for those who live in Albania and are interested in participating, you can check in with the lovely owners of 28 November here for more details.
I have been less than impressed with certain other endeavors by the Albanian government. Bookstores are now classified as essential businesses and will be open for business between 5:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. I am not sure that this move makes sense—it might even endanger booksellers unnecessarily. Many were already providing home deliveries for those in need of books, and considering the financial strains many out of work Albanians are under, books might be even less of a priority than they usually are. Plus, the National Center for Books and Reading launched a competition for writers, encouraging them to submit their quarantine books. The best will be published by the Center. The catch: the deadline for submission is May 15—as in this May. I can’t quite imagine the quality of any works written in less than two months, especially under the current circumstances.
Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon, reporting from France
Writer and opponent of the Romanian communist regime Paul Goma has died, at the age of eighty-four, from coronavirus on the night of the March 24, at La Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
An extremely complex figure, Goma was difficult to define easily: the author of multiple autobiographical novels and journals that read like crime novels, his magnum opus was, as Harold Segel puts it, a “persuasive and grimly fascinating exposure of totalitarian inhumanity.” All of his books share an incendiary shock value, thanks to their insistence on the horror of the gulag. Asymptote contributor Ruxandra Cesereanu suggests that his work be considered through an “eschatological map”: “the lost paradise of his Bessarabian childhood pulses latently in almost all of his writing (most synthesized in Le Calidor), purgatory is dominant in Ostinato (even if proving an ambiguous purgatory), and the last circle of the inferno is demonstrated in Le passion selon Piteşti. The eschatological ‘map’ is sketched inversely to Dante’s, as the trajectory of Goma’s characters is not one of salvation: the escape from the Inferno can only happen partially, and Paradise will never be found again.”
Coming from a family that had fled persecution during the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, he was already on the radar of the secret police by his adolescence, and was kicked out of university for dissident activity. Unable to continue his studies, he served as a manual labourer after years of incarceration, torture, and house arrest. His novels began to be published in translation in France and Germany in the early 1970s. In 1977, his letters of criticism to Ceauşescu and to the CSCE (appealing for respect of human rights in Romania) led to the dictator stripping Goma of his Romanian citizenship. After his expulsion, he lived in France for the rest of his life as a stateless person, criticizing the regime from afar until its collapse in 1989.
According to the medical team that cared for him, the author passed away peacefully. His ashes will be interred at the Crematorum of Père Lachaise Cemetery. We remember Paul Goma for his legacy of courage and morality and mourn his loss.
Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from Japan
Springtime in Tokyo is an indisputable gift. Though the huge numbers of citizens suffering from hay fever may protest, even they are neutralized by the sudden and impetuous appearance of the city in blooming season, the greys and hardened edges overwhelmed by colour, the near-mystical evidences of life, willing out.
The literary world of Tokyo is most demonstrably affected in these crippling times by the huge increase in demand for, and subsequent generous reprinting of, genre author 高嶋哲夫 Tetsuo Takashima’s 2013 novel, 首都感染 (The Pandemic). The narrative, taking place during an undetermined future, centers on a deadly flu originating from China during the World Cup; having no other options but containment, the Tokyo government instigates a city-wide lockdown. Tetsuo is famed for writing “prescient” works; in 2008, his novel 津波 (Tsunami) detailed a devastating earthquake and tsunami hitting the Tokai region of Japan, ravaging the landscape and leaving in its wake the wreckage of a nuclear plant—three years before the horrific earthquake off the coast of Tohoku and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Of course, the magic can be explained away with simple rationale: Japan’s particular geographical vulnerabilty to natural disasters, and an omnipresence of viruses as central tropes of genre fiction. Additionally, there is one aspect of reality that was not enacted in his writing.
It is technically illegal in Japan to enforce city-wide lockdowns in the examples of Italy or China. The ministry is unable to shut down public transportation, nor are they allowed to forcibly enact stay-home measures; free movement is a fundamental right for Japanese citizens and residents. Daily life continues, but as Minae Mizumura said in her pandemic journal for the NYRB: “A life of semi-isolation hardly bothered me, because, as an aging novelist, I’d been leading such a life for years anyway, knowing that the time left for me to write was limited, with or without the deadly virus floating in the air.”
The fact that we seek literature as a cartography for these times reinstill the vitality to continue writing, continue supporting local presses and booksellers, and most importantly, continue orienting our minds around a future that does not solely revolve around our current devastation. What was predicted may come to pass, but if there is anything to be learned from literature, it is that where human knowledge knows limits, human imagination does not.
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Read more dispatches on the Asymptote blog: