It is never too late to make your debut in literature: Lélia Dimitriu is 84 years old, and we feel that she has long matured her first book, The Daughter of the Enemy of the People. Age advantage? This dashing octogenarian writes with a modesty, poetry and thought that are too often absent among today’s young authors, who tend to unpack their moods without taking the trouble to think. Lélia Dimitriu was inspired by this search for lost time thanks to an unusual muse: Vladimir Poutine. On February 24, 2022, when Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine, all of its past resurfaced, and in particular the parade of Red Army tanks in the avenues of Bucharest, on August 31, 1944. She then launched into his manuscript.
Lélia Dimitriu does not specify whether The Daughter of the Enemy of the People is a “novel” or a “story”, but we feel that this 400-page flashback is entirely autobiographical, that she has just changed a few names – she herself renames herself Lena. His Balkan saga opens with a eulogy of his father, nicknamed “the Maestro”, who is treated with more respect than the progenitors of our autofiction writers. Of Macedonian origin, hero of the First World War, the Maestro made his fortune in art furniture. Unhappy at home, he begins an affair with a younger woman. Unable to obtain a divorce, he forces his mistress to abort – which she will do ten times in ten years. The eleventh time, the gynecologists are against it: too dangerous. And so Lena was born under her mother’s name in 1939 – she would be recognized a little later.
In 1944, with Bucharest collapsing under bombing, the Maestro loaded his children into his Chrysler Imperial and moved them to safety in the countryside. But in 1945, after submission to Hitler’s Germany, Romania officially passed into the hands of Stalinist Russia during the Yalta Accords, to which Lélia Dimitriu devotes an astonishing page, painting Roosevelt and Churchill as “cynical old men”. For the upper bourgeoisie of Bucharest, which is Lena’s world, it is the beginning of the end. Businesses are nationalized, private homes requisitioned.
On December 24, 1951, in the middle of Christmas dinner, three big guns from the Securitate (the secret political police) came to arrest the Maestro. After a stint in prison, he retrained as a simple worker in his own company. As a child, then a teenager, Lena dreams of elsewhere. For a time, she imagined a career as an international gymnast, like Nadia Comăneci a generation later, before giving it up when she was offered experimental hormonal treatment. Lena will not be a guinea pig. She studies and falls in love with an elusive character, the writer Milo Dragu, who introduces her to the literary bohemia of Bucharest. It is in this part that The Daughter of the Enemy of the People definitely takes off. The always accurate tone recalls that of Anne Wiazemsky’s stories and the atmosphere takes us back to certain novels by Milan Kundera, those where he recounted the communist Czechoslovakia of his youth, when we had to navigate carefully between double agents and real-false friends. After an incredible marriage to this Milo Dragu, Lena will meet a Frenchman, marry him, and fly to Paris in 1967, where a new life awaits her…
If this melancholy book can be read for the undeniable charm it exudes, it also has the merit of reminding us of the culpable blindness of a certain French left. Lélia Dimitriu recounts her “dismay” in the face of the demonstrations she saw with her eyes in Paris at the end of the 1960s, lyrical parades mixing Maoists, Trotskyists and Castroists: “But what could I do against their enthusiasm, their euphoria, their certainties? worse, for me, it was outside the street, in the apartments, the cafes, the teachers’ rooms where I worked, when I risked explaining to them, to these commies barely out of the nest, what was communism in a communist country, I passed for a reactionary, an idiot, an American spy…” We think here of Simon Leys: from 1971, in Chairman Mao’s New Clothes, he described the reality of China and attracted the wrath of Maoist intellectuals who had never set foot there. No doubt that the great Leys would have found in The Daughter of the Enemy of the People this lucidity which was so dear to him.
The Daughter of the Enemy of the People, by Lélia Dimitriu. Grasset, 407 p., €23.