Word: gheorghiu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...TWENTY-FIFTH HOUR (404 pp.)-C. Virgil Gheorghiu, translated by Rita Eldon-Knopf...
...there was but one solemn touch. A long, patient line had formed before a plain board platform. On it sat a slender, spectacled novelist rapidly autographing stacks of his latest book. They were selling as fast as he could write his name in a large clear hand: C. Virgil Gheorghiu. Within a couple of hours he had sold close to 1,000 copies of The Twenty-Fifth Hour...
Helpless Heroes. Gheorghiu has two heroes, both Rumanians, neither of them guilty of any crime. Johann is a naive young farmhand who is sent to a labor camp by a police official who covets his wife. Traian is a famous novelist and minor diplomat whose first internment comes when the Yugoslavs pick him up as an enemy alien. Once imprisoned, each begins a pointless odyssey of torture and despair that ends with Traian's death in a camp and Johann's enlistment (to escape another round of internments) in the army of "the West" at the start...
...innocent helplessness of its heroes that gives The Twenty-Fifth Hour its heavy coating of irony. Men, Gheorghiu is saying, no longer think in terms of individuals or their happiness. Human life has ceased to mean anything except as a cog in some machine or pattern. Production, material results, categories, statistics-these are all that count. The criminals are not so much the Nazis and the Communists as the big-machine boys everywhere. And of all the nations in the world, says Gheorghiu, it is the U.S. that most fervently worships the twin cults of bigness and the machine. Author...
Choice in Despair. Despite its European popularity, The Twenty-Fifth Hour is no literary masterpiece. Its plot is heavily propped with coincidence, the characters are undeveloped and its message is spelled out with "petitions" that bring the story to repeated full stops. Gheorghiu's villain, machine-age power, is neither an original nor a persuasive one. What gives the book its impact is its assembly of evidence of man's inhumanity to man, by no means peculiar to the machine...