Wolves and Rotten Apples (Lupi și mere stricate), Pavcon 2019, winner of AntaresFEST Award for debut volume, and shortlisted for the Romanian National Science Fiction and Fantasy Award.
https://pavcon.ro/produs/lupi-si-mere-stricate-pompilian-tofilescu
https://carturesti.ro/carte/lupi-si-mere-stricate-408215330
Reviews:
Pompilian Tofilescu has published, with the Bucharest-based PAVCON publishing house, a volume bearing the surprising title Wolves and Rotten Apples. The book comprises stories written both before and after 1989, most of them in Craiova.
Pompilian Tofilescu succeeds in astonishing and delighting us, offering the reader’s imagination an elevated play of emotions and symbols through his strange, cryptic tales, with their secret allusions, oscillating between the Gothic air of Lovecraft and an unusual nostalgia that lightly veils the atmosphere of many of the stories—a nostalgia I have not encountered in the work of any other Romanian science-fiction writer, with the exception of the late Mihai Grămescu.
Indeed, some of the prose brings to mind that Aporisticon of which many have said that the less science fiction it contains, the more literary it becomes. But what, after all, is science fiction, that we should not regard it as great literature?
At times, Wolves and Rotten Apples is a sheaf of metaphors, and the ways in which they are sometimes brought together can be startling, opening up astonishing perspectives:
“Composed of enormous slabs joined together like the pieces of a puzzle—a man-made replica of the continental plates, using mountain ranges as columns and buttresses—turning with the Earth and forming its newest outer shell, the platform had for many centuries harbored, on its two faces, two entirely different societies, both petrified in an eternal social immobility and in a state of continuous loss. Both helping the passage of time widen the chasm that separated them.”
The author is a stylist who, despite the great variety of themes he approaches, maintains his unity and preserves his breath, his cadence, throughout the entire volume. The prose derives its narrative force from the admirable authority of the sentence, often very long without ever becoming suffocating, recalling certain South American writers as well as Europeans such as Joyce and Le Clézio.
Elsewhere, the author favors elaborate constructions verging on postmodernism, as in the story “Enclosed in an Eggshell I Fly,” or in “Still Life with Wolves and Rotten Apples,” which gives the volume its title, inventing intricate parallel planes whose reality can never be established with certainty.
Then, in ”The Hour After Midnight”, there arise images worthy of Borges’s pen, images that might honorably have found a place in his Book of Sand:
“Silencing the laughter and fragments of conversation, stilling the chime of crystal and the lament of the music, an unseen clock began to strike, muffled, the twelve strokes of midnight. As though the hidden heart of the castle itself had begun to beat, marking the first hour of its existence.
“And with midnight, the Prince appeared among his guests. Tall and pale, his eyes burning, he seemed the ghost of an age that the people of the present could do no more than crudely imitate.
“‘Is it true that the clock we have just heard is sealed within the foundations of the house?’ one of the guests whispered, addressing the voices with which he had conversed throughout the evening, attempting to verify the truth of a rumor born in the modern imagination from ancient legends.
“Suspended in the silence between the beating of the castle’s heart and the Prince’s entrance, the question sounded unnaturally loud as it struck the frozen air.
“‘Almost true,’ the Prince replied. ‘Because until a few moments ago, I was not yet certain that it existed. And because this castle was designed as a labyrinth in which every room delays time, while in the place around which it was built there was, in the beginning, nothing but a machine programmed to destroy itself and then to create, from itself, something capable of measuring time… when time finally reached it.’”
But Tofilescu’s texts are multivalent and difficult to place within any single literary current. They oscillate between harshness—including a harshness of language that makes no attempt to avoid vulgar words—and the diaphanous, faintly nostalgic atmosphere of others, a yearning for an imaginary world that reveals itself only with difficulty, step by step:
“And she truly was more beautiful now, lucid and trembling, seeming to float upon the surface of a body of water; the Moon is drowning, he realized in alarm, and leapt forward, determined to save her. Farewell, Marie, yes, this is a good beginning, I have to leave; he was no longer even surprised to find himself rising slowly, as though climbing an invisible staircase; his foot sank into the seething mass of creatures knotted beneath his soles; the sole of my foot is burning as though on a griddle; around him, the night had greedily swallowed everything, leaving behind only a few splinters and a miraculous stain of yellow, too distant, perhaps, or too brilliant for its filthy teeth.”
The stories become musical scores in which vice acquires innocence and candor veers into perversity. The actions and characters are timeless; the space in which events unfold has few points of contact with the real world. It is always another world, and then another, like a game played with mirrors, some more deceitful than others:
“His thoughts began to furrow the room with luminous iridescence; he saw the fallen veil of canvas and the frightened child staring into the mirror as it began to cloud over. He knew all these images, and he was no longer amused even by the fact that he could anticipate them by a fraction of a second. He saw the child’s face—perceived, within the unfolding of this dream, as his own face—taking shape in the mirror’s troubled depths. Then he fell prey to memory.”
The explanation comes later, when, two pages on, the character examines his own existence:
“He imagined the enormous glass shell within which he had isolated himself. The interior: deep armchairs and sofas, robots, medieval swords, sophisticated control systems, animal pelts spread across the floors, computers, mismatched pieces of period furniture—a chaotic mixture of the present, the past, and the very distant past. Not the future. He was aware that, for him, the future had long since ceased to exist.
“Then the exterior: the tower at whose summit the shell had been installed. The immense city without people, its streets overrun with vegetation; the hills crowding against the edge of the metropolis; very far away, the forest, where he could sense the rebels’ presence, seething with hatred; and, keeping watch over everything, the vast and terrifying expanse of space.”
The metaphor of the mirror ultimately becomes a key to the entire volume, in which all the characters move egocentrically through their worlds, engaged in a continuous and desperate search for the self.
The seeds of rewritten myth appear in stories such as “Corn”; a kind of rewritten and reorganized Bible emerges in other stories, including “And He Lifted Her Toward the Sky,” “The First Word,” and “Manna.”
The explicit references to members of science-fiction fandom—particularly those from Craiova—are a delight, as in the story “An Artist’s Life,” though they also appear, less explicitly, in several of the other stories.
And perhaps the adventure of writing this book deserves to be summed up in a single sentence. Thinking about it, I realized that the author himself had already done so:
“The events of this story, whose humble and fortunate witness I was, took place on a distant planet that you, dear reader, may know from journeys you have undertaken—with your body or only in thought—and in a time in relation to which you are now either younger or older, unborn or dead, or—why not?—a contemporary.”
Mircea Liviu GOGA
Fantastica Magazine, issue 3, 2024