T. O. Bobe, Curl, Trans. by Sean Cotter, Wakefield Press, 2019.
“Death doesn't scare me. Its barbershop does.”
Mr. Gica is the world's greatest barber. He is one-point-sixty-two meters tall and weighs fifty-eight kilograms. He is also the fastest barber in the world. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave.
Mr. Gica’s shop has six mirrors on the walls, six sinks, six barber chairs, and no employees. Always crowded, its chairs always occupied, the barbershop forms an off-kilter microcosm: a world of melancholic kitsch that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, fantasies of Edith Piaf, four lost hippies, and other ludic figures—including our superhuman protagonist's ever-lurking antagonist in perpetual disguise, Dorel Vasilescu.
Trying on a variety of voices and modes like so many work coats, Curl scissor-snips love poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, diary entries, streams of words without punctuation, cultural references, and a number of rebellious hairs off a number of necks to sculpt a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness.
Curl is a mix of poetry and prose, presented in short chapters/pieces, featuring a barber, Mr.Gică -- "the world's greatest barber". He is completely devoted to his craft -- obsessive, even, and fast: his shop has six chairs -- always full -- but he has no assistants, just going down the line, morning to night, snipping away. Apparently, he never even sleeps (he has pajamas, but he never wears them, only occasionally taking them out to admire them): when the barbershop closes for the night, he becomes: "the world's greatest clandestine hairstyler", coiffing six women's hair in the fanciest styles.
Curl presents the man, his accomplishments -- Olympic medals, an impressive clientele --, and some of his dreams (to own a car -- "But not to drive" --, or how he wants to be preserved after death). He has a nemesis -- Dorel Vasilescu -- who features in a variety of the vignettes, while real-world figures feature as well, as customers or, for example, annual visitors on World Mental Health Day (when Einstein, Napoleon, and Yuri Gagarin, among others, drop by).
Most of the pieces are short prose vignettes, in some way presenting Mr.Gică, but there are also numerous (more-obviously-)poems; some pieces build or even directly comment on others (for example, the prose-and-poem 'Barbershop Nights: An Eyewitness Account' is followed by 'What the Pagodas Dreamed in the Poem "Barbershop Nights"').
For all his expertise and genius, there's a melancholy feel to Mr.Gică's single-minded focus, a pervasive loneliness that's nicely conveyed by Bobe. The mock-seriousness ("Hair is humanity's greatest enemy") is kept at just the right pitch -- and Mr.Gică's fundamental sadness well-conveyed:
I killed the apprentices,Mr.Gică faces his loneliness, and also faces mortality, leaving him wondering about a life spent doing nothing else -- and worried that, that too, is his fate ever after; as one of the loveliest lines has it: "Death doesn't scare me. Its barbershop does."
because they wanted to repeat that which cannot be repeated,
that is, the ephemeral.
Presented in a typically lovely little pocket-sized edition from Wakefield Press, and with a helpful Afterword by translator Sean Cotter that gives some biographical information about the author, as well as offering some interesting observations about the translation itself, Curl is an appealing little work. - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/romania/bobeto.htm
T. O. Bobe is a prize-winning Romanian poet, novelist, and screenwriter living in Bucharest.
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