First published in 2013, Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland links modern Moldova to the metaphysics of magical thinking, bridging the chasm between socio-political reality and children’s play. The second novel to emerge from Corobca and Monica Cure’s writer-and-translator duo, Kinderland follows the acclaimed The Censor’s Notebook, which earned Cure the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; it colors in The Censor’s Notebook’s negatives of political repression, probing the social legacies proliferating in the long shadow of communism through the tangential prism of a young girl’s imagination.
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Kinderland by Liliana Corobca, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure, Seven Stories, 2023
From the German, Kinderland: children’s land, land for children, the country of children, the children’s state. But also: winterland, wonderland, Alice, wanderland. Liliana Corobca’s original Romanian title for Kinderland refracts its light onto the novel’s substance, and Monica Cure’s English translation draws on an exquisite textual structure, sensitively conveying its narrator’s preternatural style of creative contemplation.
Beyond the third person opening sequence, no section of the novel is over six pages long; they follow the irreverently earnest voice of Cristina, a young girl caring for her two siblings in her parents’ absence, and is directly addressed to a shifting “you”. Throughout, page breaks are forfeited, constructing a visual configuration that reposes on Corobca’s and Cure’s craft as writers and sustaining an undialectical, seemingly uncontrolled style that recalls the meanderings—and moral certitude—of one’s own twelve-year-old introspections. These ruminations and recollections are a succession of light exposures, spanning the summer of Cristina’s thirteenth year, and each resembles a photograph, a vignette of latent action that flows into the memory or emotion at its blurred peripheries. Kinderland’s loose-limbedness articulates Cristina’s coming-of-age in limpid textuality, impressed on a textual emulsion milky with village childhood.
Kinderland’s omniscient “proemium” also preaches on speed, instructing the reader on how to plumb Cristina’s fragmented essence from the novel’s brevity: “Quickly, everything’s done quickly. Wash it quickly. . . if you wash the stain quickly, it comes out easily.” And Cristina, in particular, inhabits the same spiritual and wondrous landscape as Lady Macbeth (she and her brothers play in woods as otherworldly as Birnam Wood). From a cinematic, bird’s-eye view, Kinderland’s incipit glides the reader over the country of children. With her parents elsewhere, she looks after “two brothers, a dog, a cat, a pig, ten chickens, a scrappy rooster. . . the last thing I needed with this entire army was a bunch of goats.” She, Dan, and Marcel live in an atavistic, almost pre-technological village of wells and wool and walnuts, but beneath their daily corporeality flower a sensuous realm of fleawort, wounds, and witchcraft.
Amidst this world both concrete and conjured, Corobca’s narrative yields a sense of being guided to the root of an infection—some sickness that would explain why no capable adults are around to unlatch the vampiric tick from Dan’s belly. It turns out that the president of the United States of America in Cristina’s thirteenth summer is its first Black president, Barack Obama, and that “an internet cable” has already “been laid” in Cristina’s village. Cristina’s parents are economic migrants, sending remittance packages home to Cristina, Dan, and Marcel. While this historicity is never the mystery galvanizing Kinderland’s progression, it compresses the novel’s temporality, animating the action underpinning Cristina’s vignettes. The novel’s first half tends towards ‘slice-of-life’ images, depicting Cristina’s quotidian troubles and laughs, shepherding her brothers—“I sweep, I wash the floors. . . I work my butt off instead of going out to play too”—or interacting with the wider world in the matrix of the village—“No one brings us fruit. . . if you don’t help yourself, no one will.” Beneath the floating barter of emotional and familial need linking Cristina to her village, Corobca grounds Cristina in its animals, sketching an empath at ease with kindness towards the abandoned. In two instances, she erects parallels between animal families of “cats” and “swallows,” and Cristina’s own dislocated family. Kinderland contains its call for kindness within concentric circles of humor, irony, and tragedy, projected through the clarity of Cristina’s voice.
The word Kinderland comes to Cristina and the reader three-quarters through the book from the name of a game the village children play together, in which they mockingly imitate the adults they know, from teachers to police to the American president—these ironized and reluctantly abided authority figures of the children-state. Cristina says: “The little kinderland, the big kinderland. The one we laugh about and the one we cry about.” But the little kinderland is a projection of the big one’s real brutalities—and both are worth crying for. As Corobca’s prose continues spinning Cristina’s candor, the reader reaches into the depths of the word for its inner world, in which kinder doesn’t evoke only childhood, or games, or even violent subversions of the expected associations.
Sometimes, the little kinderland impressions a cruelty sharper than the big kinderland’s in its innocence, originating from the unadulterated spring of the human soul. Cristina’s vignette of another village child, Ştefănel, and the torture he enacts upon his dog and his schoolmates at the novel’s precise midpoint, tips Kinderland into the metaphysics of the psychic unconscious, and what a parent’s abandonment can lead towards. The depths disturbed here vaguely educe the early chapters of Hermann Hesse’s Demian: “But that child. . . was a child with a mother. Ştefănel had no idea what that meant.” Cristina, on the other hand, does seem to know. This is where the novel’s mood occasionally trips. Despite flashes of aphoristic didacticism—“People who are afraid first of animals, then of other people, come to fear even their own shadows”—the novel wisely gains balance on the fulcrum of Cristina’s vulnerability. “My thought is for Mom to come home. A very short thought: Mom home!”
With parents away “making long money” in the EU and Russia, Cristina’s perspective fills in the thematic blanks between orphanhood, magical thinking, and coming of age. To Christina, adults are big children—just with alcohol available to them, but Corobca allows the reader to permeate the borderlands between the little and big kinderlands, subtly shading in a poignant social criticism. That is where the big state and the little state coalesce: in the contiguous space of Cristina’s ageless empathy. As Kinderland quickens to its conclusion, its awareness of analog time fuses with the digital, like deep history dissolving in the fast-forward. Contracted to a single question, Kinderland might ask: how do children grow? How does time hurt their innocence? Cristina asks as much as she answers. She is a child raising other children.
Towards Kinderland’s ending, an extended sequence spins a “you-within-a-you” structure. Cristina’s arc imbues a new friend, Alisa, with narrative power, personifying an ecocentric strand of witchy, sacred thinking that pivots Kinderland’s final quarter away from despair and towards wonder. Alisa hazily echoes the Demian to Cristina’s Sinclair. She teaches Cristina how to cure sadness and heal sickness. By recreating Alisa’s words verbatim, Alisa’s “you” blossoms to encompass the reader alongside Cristina, and Cristina internalizes the reader, contracting the distance between the “I” and the village’s generosity of plural dimensions.
“Do you know that there are people who can really float? They have so much soul that it lifts them off the ground. . . Alisa talks a lot and I listen to her without ever getting tired.” Cristina’s voice is most convincing in the soft corners of her uncertainty, or her certain compassion for the world around her. She isn’t an unreliable narrator so much as a naïve narrator—and she’s funny. Cure’s translation crafts a character whose irony is a mark of care, a speaker as immensely sympathetic in English as in Romanian. Dan and Marcel, too, are wonderfully drawn, embodying the tension between reality and wishful dreaming. Though Corobca is alert to the need for ambivalence in regards to the supernatural, there is a magical dimension, imagined or not, to every child’s world: the small yet awestriking might of being human, the force of being alive. Cristina lives aware of this force. Her flashing subjectivity explodes into a universal radiance. “At the horizon, everything belongs to you… I had conquered the first horizon in my life.” The vignette whitens in a cohesion of light.
Silver, the chemical medium of analog photography, is a pure metal embedded on the surface of time. Highly malleable, it reflects the light it receives. Kinderland renders that elemental luminosity in its form through its speaker. In the flash of its 160 pages, it collates a wonderland of violence and magic, parallel to the blinding, bleeding reality of contemporary EU policies, without ever self-victimizing. It presents a filmic whole of village life in the wake of Moldovan migration. Through Corobca’s careful composition and Cure’s deft tuning of Cristina’s translated voice, the little kinderland’s orphans enter a realm that houses witches as willingly as long-lost parents. Kinderland’s afterglow lingers.
Michelle Chan Schmidt is a writer and editor from Hong Kong. She edits fiction for Asymptote. Her creative writing, essays, and translations have been published or are forthcoming in La Piccioletta Barca, The Oxonian Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and Asymptote. A selection is available here.
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