A village in the Carpathian Mountains, one of the last outposts of
pre-modernity, an elderly man, sensing his time is short, tells his
young grandchildren tales that weave a family saga covering the
real history from the 1870s to the time of the telling. One of the
children, now grown, is the re-teller of these tales, while the
other, Miruna, perhaps has the gift of second sight. Incorporating
elements of fantasy common to the storytelling traditions of the
Balkans, historical characters mix with imaginary beings in a
landscape that recreates the world of an isolated village bearing
an unusual name: Evil Vale. Ancestors are talked about as if
ancient heroes, and the novel shifts focus between telling about
their lives and the storyteller's own experiences through the prism
of the village during both world wars. As past tragedies are
presented in a way that the grandchildren might picture and
remember them, the novel has been called a kind of meta-fairy tale,
a story about the lost tradition of oral storytelling itself, the
conveyance of a family history from one generation to the next via
the spoken word. With the death of the grandfather, the children
realize that confronted with the ubiquitous hand of modernity,
which the village has managed to frustrate over a succession of
regimes, a whole world of stories and the entire memory of a family
and of its idiosyncratic way of life in the village might have been
irrevocably lost. Blending the autobiographical and historical with
the marvelous, Miruna, a Tale is a novel whose core is the
exploration of the imaginary themes and motives that informed
traditional society in the mountainous regions of Romania, a world
that was radically transformed into virtual extinction over the
course of the 20th century. Described by one critic as a "literary
jewel whose strange and singular spell holds the reader in its
thrall," Miruna, a Tale received the Bucharest Writers Association
Fiction Award in 2007.
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