/ world today news/ With the allegorical novel “Life at a Station”, Octavian Paler (1927-2007) breaks his interesting and valuable series of realistic opuses (“Heart polemics”, “Imaginary letters”, “Don Quixote in the East”, ” Galileo’s defense, “Self-Portrait in a Broken Mirror”) and turns to the genre of the existential novel-essay. Reflecting on the fate of man in the modern world and the meaning of life, he turns to the literature of the absurd and continues the searches of his illustrious predecessors: Franz Kafka (“The Trial”), Albert Camus (“The Plague”), Sartre (“The Abomination” ), Dino Budzati (“The Tartar Desert”), Eugene Ionesco (“The Rhinos”), Samuel Beckett (“Waiting for Godot”).
On the other hand, the fact that it was carried out with a specific purpose, in this case a veiled, because of the cruel censorship in Romania, criticism of the totalitarian communist society of the most terrible years for our northern neighbor in the twentieth century, cynically named by the dictator Ceausescu “The Golden Age “, gives him a worthy award among several of his colleagues – authors of similar novels: A. E. Bakonski (“The Black Church”), Bužor Nedelković (“The Second Messenger”), Ion Jeremiah (“Gulliver in the Land of Lies”) and the well-known in our country, Ion Desiderio Serbu (“Goodbye, Europe!”).
Like most prose works of this kind, “Life at a Station” is not a typical work with a “key”, with the help of which real, concrete figures and situations can be easily identified, but is rather a novel in which states, images and ideas are clothed in fiction, in the very fabric of the narrative. But this fabric is too fragile and gives way to philosophical meditations, to the author’s internal monologues, which makes the narration somehow “transparent”, makes the reader accept the suggested ideas implicitly. Because this author’s language is decidedly Aesopian. Octavian Paller is a novelist of a decidedly philosophical bent, a remarkable scholar at that, and of immense culture, which makes these passages of his narrative very interesting. Impressive is his allusion to the socialist revolution, through the interesting episodes related to the French Revolution of 1791 and the trial of Maximilian Robespierre. The main theme of the pleas “for” and “against” here is that the guilty of terror are not only the revolutionaries (communists) – the “agents of Evil”, but also the audience itself, which accepts them passively, without resisting and rebelling , simply out of opportunism or fear. A fear that had paralyzed the peoples of Eastern Europe who fell victim to Russian imperial ambitions (which, in fact, continue today). Paller is obsessed with the “tipping point,” or the moment when a victim, scared to death, makes a deal with his tormentors.
But what is the plot here, if there is one?
A man and a woman meet on the platform of a small abandoned station. Two lonely characters – monads, unable to adapt to the world. He is a history teacher who fled his town terrorized by cobra tamers. Her name is Eleanor and she has also left her town, which has been taken over by dog trainers. The station where the two are is completely cut off from the world, without a telephone, with a clock without hands, with a sign on which there is no schedule of trains that haven’t actually passed through here for a long time. Nearby there is only a forest and a swamp, and beyond it – a desert… A series of disturbing events follows. The cobras of the Master’s city (he actually led the story), here are a symbol of the fear that exists in each of us, of hidden feelings that, once released, can poison our lives. And tamers are primitive, marginal types, from the dregs of society (living next to the swamp), which the government uses to intimidate the citizens. Likewise, the dog trainers of Eleanor’s town – an allusion to the sinister Romanian security service of Ceausescu’s time, the Securitate – cause panic among the inhabitants to keep them in fear and submission. Through the symbol of cobras and dogs, Octavian Paller instills in us the truth that if we do not oppose them in time, the tyrants who have appeared among us always manage to manipulate us, subdue us, disempower us. And in this situation of universal terror, the Teacher-narrator claims that only two alternatives are possible: to surrender in the face of Fear, to perish, or to become a slave, to adapt to the situation…
And the Station is just a dead spot, through which neither a train nor a person passes, only flocks of crows fly over in winter, and swarms of mosquitoes in summer. It is simply a historical symbol, an image of the collapse of the so-called a “communist ideal” in which the author himself unreservedly and blindly believed in his youth.
Octavian Paller’s novel is a parable novel, exploring in a remarkable, moving way the anatomy of fear and absurdity, the image of a supposedly new or renewed society, in fact ours, that aspired to bright heights, but turned out to be a victim of his delusions.
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