Ovidiu Moceanu, Nuvelistica lui Fănuş Neagu
Fănuş Neagu’s short story fiction
Ovidiu Moceanu’s study gives an overview of Fănuş Neagu’s short story fiction up to the volume Pierdut în Balcania – Lost in Balcania (1982), which he considers a synthesis and configuration of the defining elements for the author’s narrative art. The obsession of the pure word is, undoubtedly, one of the most striking dimensions of Fănuş Neagu’s prose. Even in the case of possibly less successful stories, comprised especially in the first volumes, the failings do not have stylistic causes. The sensation of elaboration is dispersed under the extraordinary pressure of daily life happenings, sometimes so brutal they fringe paroxysm, some other times picturesque or eccentric. The preoccupation for composition is overt in all the volumes. This is exactly what Fănuş Neagu referred to when he stated that, while writing his first novel „he was overwhelmed with despair and fear”. The metaphorical density of Fănuş Neagu’s work is indebted to the school of the Romania classics (Sadoveanu, Creangă, Panait Istrati), the style being „vital”, „as each author comes up with a world, with his own world, which lives as he used to live once upon a time, in his childhood, or as he is currently living (…) The style, Fănuş Neagu specifies next, is my eye carried over the field which hosts the living world”. The author of the study starts from these statements and discovers the characteristic features of Fănuş Neagu’s short stories, considering the thematic and stylistic core of the pieces which provided the author’s unmistakable identity in the Romanian short story fiction of the second half of the 20th century.
Keywords: Short story, narration, style, metaphor, rural universe, flabbergasted characters, terror, nostalgia, customs, transition
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