Bă, Țărane! by Valeriu Barbu

📝 First Impressions

There are books you read because you are curious about somebody else’s life, and then there are books that unexpectedly make you think about your own.

Bă, Țărane! did that for me.

It is a very short book, but one built around something that can become enormous once you leave your country: dor.

I originally described it as a book about longing, but even that doesn’t quite cover it. Dor is one of those Romanian words that refuses to fit neatly into an English equivalent. Longing comes close. Homesickness comes close. Nostalgia sometimes comes close. But none of them carries exactly the same combination of absence, affection, memory, sadness and desire for something — or someone — that may no longer exist in quite the way you remember it.

And that is very much at the heart of this book.

Valeriu Barbu writes about a Romanian who leaves the country, travels and works through different parts of Europe and encounters all sorts of situations along the way. But wherever he goes, part of him remains attached to Romania and particularly to the village he remembers from childhood.

I didn’t leave Romania in the same period as the experiences described here. I left in 2017, under very different circumstances.

But leaving is still leaving.

There is still that moment when you cross a border knowing that life on the other side is going to be different.

There is still the process of learning how another country works, adapting, working, trying to understand people, dealing with situations you could never have predicted beforehand and occasionally wondering exactly how you ended up there.

And there is still home.

Sometimes annoyingly so.

You can build a life somewhere else and still find that certain memories remain stubbornly attached to you.

That was probably why this little book affected me more than I initially expected.

I recognised something in it.

Not every event.

Not every journey.

But the feeling behind them.

And once I started reading, I stayed glued to my tablet until I reached the end.

💜 What I Loved

The strongest part of Bă, Țărane! for me is its relationship with home.

Not Romania as a political idea.

Not Romania as something to idealise.

Not even Romania exactly as it exists today.

The book is much more interested in the Romania that survives in memory.

And those are two very different things.

When you live abroad for long enough, you discover something rather strange: the place you miss isn’t always the place you would actually find if you returned tomorrow.

You miss streets as they were.

People as they were.

Houses as they were.

You miss conversations, smells, routines and tiny details that probably seemed completely insignificant while you were living them.

Most of all, you sometimes miss the person you were when all those things still belonged to your everyday life.

That is where the idea of dor becomes so important.

You aren’t necessarily longing only for a country.

Sometimes you are longing for a version of your life.

And time is considerably harder to travel through than geography.

I understood that much more deeply after leaving Romania myself.

I left in 2017, so my experience was obviously different from the one portrayed in this book. Technology was different, communication was easier, information was much more accessible, and Europe itself was a very different place for Romanians travelling and working abroad.

But emotional geography doesn’t modernise quite as quickly.

You can have a smartphone, instant messaging and cheap flights and still find yourself missing something you cannot simply retrieve.

That part felt very familiar.

I also enjoyed the book’s affection for the Romanian village.

In my original notes, I compared certain parts of Bă, Țărane! with Alexandru Vlahuță’s România pitorească, and I still understand why that comparison came to me.

I’m not suggesting they are the same kind of book.

They aren’t.

But there is a similar awareness of landscape, place and the relationship between people and the land around them.

At times, Bă, Țărane! feels almost like a small elegy for the Romanian village as it existed for our parents and grandparents.

And I think that’s important.

Because villages change.

Communities disappear.

People leave.

Older generations die.

Traditions become memories.

A place can continue to exist geographically while the world you associate with it has vanished almost completely.

There is something genuinely sad about that.

The book also doesn’t require Romania to be perfect in order to love it.

I appreciated that enormously.

I don’t enjoy sentimental writing that turns the past into some immaculate golden age where everybody was wonderful and everything was better.

It wasn’t.

Romania has always contained contradictions.

Beauty and ugliness.

Warmth and cruelty.

Generosity and pettiness.

Humour and tragedy.

Things that make you furious enough to leave and things that, years later, can make you desperately homesick.

That contradiction feels real to me.

And Bă, Țărane! understands it.

Another thing I appreciated was simply how readable it was.

This isn’t normally the kind of book I automatically reach for. Give me fantasy, science fiction, horror, dystopian fiction or something bizarre and I’m usually happier.

But every now and then I realise that I miss reading something unmistakably Romanian.

Something about us.

Not necessarily something flattering.

Just something recognisable.

The way people speak.

The way people think.

The absurd situations.

The stubbornness.

The humour.

The ability to somehow continue even when absolutely nothing appears to be going according to plan.

There were parts of this book where that familiarity mattered more to me than literary complexity ever could.

And that is probably why I read the whole thing in one sitting.

🤔 What Didn’t Quite Work for Me

The frustrating part is that my biggest problem with Bă, Țărane! wasn’t really the story.

It was the editing.

When I first read the book, I remember thinking that I would have given it four stars if it hadn’t contained editorial mistakes.

That still sums up my reaction surprisingly well.

Typos and small errors happen. I’m not going to punish a book severely because one letter wandered off somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be.

But when mistakes become frequent enough that I start noticing the editing instead of concentrating on the writing, they interfere with the reading experience.

And that happened here.

It was particularly irritating because I was actually enjoying the book.

I was emotionally engaged.

I wanted to keep reading.

I recognised some of what the author was trying to express.

The editorial mistakes were particularly frustrating because I was actually enjoying the book. I was emotionally engaged, I wanted to keep reading, and I recognised much of what the author was trying to express. Every error therefore felt like an unnecessary interruption in a reading experience that otherwise worked remarkably well for me.

The other limitation is its brevity.

The main narrative I read was only around 81 pages, which makes this a very quick read.

The paperback currently listed online contains 123 pages overall, but the story itself as I remember reading it was considerably shorter.

And sometimes I wanted more.

More about leaving.

More about the different places.

More about adapting to life abroad.

More about what happens psychologically when you spend years away from your country.

More about the village.

More about what it feels like to return to something you’ve preserved in memory and discover that reality has continued changing while you were gone.

There are some very large subjects hidden inside this very small book.

Migration.

Identity.

Belonging.

Memory.

Home.

Loss.

And, of course, dor.

I would happily have spent more time with all of them.

But that is also a strangely positive complaint.

I wasn’t wishing the book would hurry up and finish.

I was wishing it had given itself more room.

👥 Who Would Enjoy This Book?

I think Bă, Țărane! will resonate most strongly with Romanian readers, particularly Romanians who have lived abroad.

You don’t need to have left during the same period as the protagonist.

I certainly didn’t.

The practical experience of migration changes enormously from one generation to another, but some of the emotional parts remain remarkably similar.

Leaving home.

Learning somewhere new.

Adapting.

Looking back.

Realising that distance can make ordinary memories unexpectedly precious.

And discovering that dor has an irritating ability to appear when you least expect it.

If you’ve lived outside Romania for years, there is a good chance you’ll recognise at least some of that.

I would also recommend it to readers interested in autobiographical writing, migration, Romanian identity and the traditional Romanian village.

And perhaps especially to people who sometimes find themselves missing a Romania that doesn’t quite exist anymore.

Because that is one of the most interesting things about nostalgia.

We often think we miss places.

Sometimes we actually miss times.

💭 Final Thoughts

I liked Bă, Țărane!.

More importantly, I connected with it.

There is a difference.

This isn’t the kind of book I normally search for, and on paper it sits quite far outside my usual reading comfort zone.

But apparently I needed something like this.

Something Romanian.

Something about leaving and remembering.

Something about that complicated relationship you can develop with home after living somewhere else.

I left Romania in 2017.

My journey is not the protagonist’s journey, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

Different period.

Different circumstances.

Different experiences.

But I understand what it means to cross a border and discover that leaving a country physically is considerably easier than separating yourself from everything that country represents.

Home continues travelling with you.

Sometimes as a comfort.

Sometimes as irritation.

Sometimes as guilt.

Sometimes as nostalgia.

Sometimes simply as dor.

And that’s probably why the word matters so much here.

You can translate its individual ingredients.

Longing.

Homesickness.

Yearning.

Nostalgia.

But somehow, after combining all of them, you still haven’t quite translated dor.

The book also reminded me of why I occasionally need to return to Romanian literature.

I read so many books from other countries and so many stories set in entirely invented worlds that it can be surprisingly powerful to encounter something where I recognise the cultural texture immediately.

The good.

The bad.

The absurd.

Us, basically.

I also still stand by the slightly ridiculous observation I made in my first review: there is something about the ending that made me think it was worthy of an Oscar Wilde descendant.

I won’t explain why, because I don’t want to ruin it.

But I remember reaching those final pages and thinking that the ending had considerably more bite than I had expected.

So yes, the editorial problems cost the book a Fairy.

Without them, this very likely would have been a four for me.

I also still stand by the slightly ridiculous observation I made in my first review: there is something about the ending that made me think it was worthy of an Oscar Wilde descendant.

I won’t explain why, because I don’t want to ruin it.

But I remember reaching those final pages and thinking that the ending had considerably more bite than I had expected.

As a whole, Bă, Țărane! is a short, very readable and unexpectedly personal book that reminded me of Romania, of leaving Romania and of the strange fact that sometimes the farther you travel from somewhere, the more clearly certain pieces of it remain inside you.

📖 Book Details

Title: Bă, Țărane!
Author: Valeriu Barbu
Genre: Memoir / Autobiographical Prose
BookFairy Category: Biography
Language: Romanian
Publisher: Editura Minela
Format: Paperback
Pages: 123 pages
Main Narrative: approx. 81 pages
Publication Date: 21 December 2020
ISBN-10: 6068883973
Series: Standalone