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Novel, "Prose" series, Cartea Romānească;, 2006, 232 pages, format 130 x 200 mm

Copyright: Polirom

Translation rights sold to: All rights available

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The brides and grooms of immortality are humble humanity, the invisible majority that makes up the bulk of society : simple and downtrodden folk, the “sole” of society, whom, even though they are born, die, labour and eke out obscure lives among us, in the big cities, we do not see, whom no one reveals to us, of whose existence we are oblivious. The paradox of this lumpen humanity is that, although omnipresent, it is always marginalised, unable to cross society’s threshold of visibility and interest. While there is an “interesting” marginality, that of the deviants, criminals, bohemians, gangsters etc., whose “heroes” have always attracted the attention of art, the press and the humanities, Radu Aldulescu draws our attention to the second-rate people who always dwell at the margins of history, but who, like an invisible, apparently minor species, are those who perpetuate not only the human race and the stratum of society’s excluded, but also simple, basic values, the ‘alphabet’ of humanity. These are simple lives, insignificant occupations, eternal human dramas, existences outside history, which the novel, in its pursuit of the sensational and atypical, has not consistently examined since Zola.
The story of the Bride and Groom of Immortality is conceived in the form of three alternating and intersecting narrative levels, which slide towards a denouement of degradation precipitated by poverty. Vicissitudes, poverty and want are given the time, space and local colouring of Romania’s post-communist period of transition, beyond which the two main characters, the so called bride and groom of immortality, seem to glimpse a life beyond life, immortality, eternal life.

The three narrative levels of the novel unfold as follows :
1. The biography of Raphael Ogrinjan, raised in an orphanage, and he himself working as a teacher and supervisor in a special school for a time. After the revolution, he spends two years working as an editor for an opposition magazine, after which he remains unemployed.
2. The biography of Mirela Dogaru, from the provinces, married and divorced in Bucharest, abandoned with a child, subsequently having another child in an unmarried relationship. Her second child is born after the revolution, at a time when she is in constant search of work, so she gives the child up for adoption by a couple from abroad, in exchange for a sum of money. An illegal adoption takes place, which is in fact a sale. The sale of her own child seems to mark Mirela, just as having been an orphan seems to mark Raphael, so that he tries to scrape together a family of his own.
3. The pair’s life together is captured for an interval of around one month during a summer heat wave in the Bucharest of the 1990s. The two live together for just over a year in a oneroom flat, which they are planning to sell, because they are struggling financially and have two children to feed – their own and Mirela’s child from her first marriage. Their story is initially a love story, but descends into a kind of asceticism determined by the extreme situation to which poverty reduces them. He sends her out to beg and steal, while concomitantly developing an entire philosophy in the margins of these activities. He haunts outlying districts, as though hallucinating from hunger, and wastes time in interminable, blathering discussions ; exhaustion and hunger seem to induce mystical delirium, instilling in him the idea that he is immortal. Half in jest and half in earnest, he adopts the idea of achieving immortality through the penitence imposed by hunger and want.

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