Novel
Papucii lui Mahmud
Not translated into English
Gala Galaction · 1932
Synopsis
In 1877, during the Russo-Turkish war, the fall of Plevna brings convoys of Turkish prisoners through. Savu, a Romanian cobbler, kills a Turk one drunken night; only afterwards does he notice the dead man's torn slippers, from which frozen toes protruded, an image that haunts him once he has sobered up. He buries his victim in the grave of his own parents, then, gnawed by remorse, goes to confess to a spiritual father who, according to Lavinia Toma and Veronica Gheorghe, had guessed the crime before the confession.
Context
The novel appeared in 1932 and received, according to Adevărul, the prize of the Society of Romanian Writers. According to the presentation by its Turkish publisher, the author started from a real event of 1877, heard in his childhood, which he wrote as if he had lived it. George Călinescu saw in it a parable professing a kind of natural religion, which admits the value of all confessions; the two teachers who studied it in 2009 stress that it brings together Orthodoxy, Islam and Judaism, and that the figure of the confessor holds a central place in it. The book has been translated into Turkish.
Who it is for
A novel with a simple plot, about guilt and redemption; in Romanian, translated into Turkish but neither into French nor into English.
Prizes and reception
Toma and Gheorghe point out its value, whereas the rest of its author's prose has often been debated by critics.
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