APR

Ioana Parvulescu is an award-winning Romanian fiction author. She graduated in 1983 from the University of Bucharest and has been Professor of Modern Literature there since 1996. She has worked as a translator of both French and German literature. In 2018, the year her Secret Dialogues was also published, Parvulescu won the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel The Voice.
The novel Jonah and His Daughter translated by Alistair Ian Blyth (London, Istros Books 2024) is Parvulescu’s latest work, described as ‘a book where love comes uninvited, as it always has done, full of suspense, and our undying desire to find purpose in this life.’ 
Following on titles such as The Innocents that indicate her interest in matters Biblical and spiritual, in Jonah, Parvulescu’s re-telling of this born-again-episode-of-episodes, we are provided with a fascinating and richly-layered account of a tale from the Bible about which we may have thought we already knew everything necessary, including the story’s moral message.
Fleeing from God’s command, reckless Jonah thought he’d outrun his destiny – but he couldn’t, could he? Punished by being thrown in the ocean during a storm, he’s swallowed by a whale; surviving in its belly, he’s ejected from the great fish’s jaws after three days. This time, obeying his Lord, he goes to the erring city of Nineveh to preach repentance. Succeeding in turning it from its evil ways, the city is spared God’s destroying wrath.
It takes sleight of hand to start out with just such bare bones of a story (the Book of Jonah in the Bible’s Old Testament has a mere four chapters, whilst mentions in Judaism and Islam are brief), create for it the character of a folk tale, embellish it with elements of magical mystery enacted by a cast of engaging characters, and steer it deftly from an C8th BC opening scenario near Jaffa, an eastern Mediterranean coastal city, to a conclusion in the modern day, by which time its protagonist/narrators live spread widely across the world.
But Parvulescu is game for all this: the novel’s broad span inviting readers to cover a lot of territory: over the Mediterranean’s ancient sea roads, down its byways and along its landmasses’ trade routes, as well as across the centuries. Although one narrator bewails, ‘It all took place so many centuries ago .. I don’t know now whether imagination and forgetting twine together and play tricks on me,’ it’s worth keeping up with her pace.
In this captivating translation from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth, Parvulescu honours the in-flux nature of the oral tradition on which she draws. The novel demands close attention due to unannounced, interchangeable use of the first, second and third person, along with the novel’s moves back and forth across its two thousand years plus timespan. These are introduced by multiple narrators, who inevitably re-craft the story, each new generation adding nuance, topicality and texture.
The author achieves a consistently warm tone of voice – this stemming, I’d suggest, from the matriarchal relationship by means of which the storytelling is propelled, handed down from grandmother to granddaughter, along with possession of a talismanic ring with a blue stone. Such continuity of the female bloodline highlights the significance Parvulescu gives to women as the true conservators of the old stories. Esther, Jonah’s motherless daughter is the book’s first storyteller.
Here’s a flavour of Parvulescu’s time-warp style: an intimate episode in the vineyard, Esther and her Jaffa village women friends retrospectively described tenderly by a grandmother of the future. They’re engaged in the seasonal activity of ‘crushing the grapes with the soles of their feet.. hopping, slipping, feeling.. the sticky juice squirt out .. The juice now came to their ankles. They were all laughing.’ Narrating this from a standpoint hundreds of years later, this grandmother freely admits to her granddaughter, ‘…things are cloudy as the grape juice. You cannot help but try  .. to decant them, to turn them into wine using your imagination – because otherwise what would be the good of telling any story?’ Another grandmother declares, ‘That’s what stories do: they do people justice or injustice’.
Does Parvulescu do Jonah justice? Describing him as ‘large and strong but clenched within himself as a fist’, she in no way writes him as conventionally heroic. Speaking little, Jonah has a (rarely-seen) enchanting smile and a big black beard. Around him swirls a cast of more vociferous male actors such as the ship’s captain, the winsome vagabond boy Elisha, and venerable, querulous Jacob, who is – or isn’t – Jonah’s true father. These interact with the troubled and taciturn Jonah in the precipitous dramas, the down- and up-turns, the injuries and accidents occurring on the stormy high seas and in far off danger-filled cities, matters from which the stay-at-home women are largely excluded.
Returning her readers every time to her female characters’ accounts of the action, Parvulescu devolves responsibility on to these narrators for the twists in her tale, its subtle ironies and sly digs. Perhaps Parvulescu’s version could be decried as confounding conventional notions of what’s really central to such a foundational narrative’s importance – but in my view it’s precisely her incorporation of these feisty and opinionated female voices into the story’s fantastical and fascinating elements that makes Jonah and His Daughter such a rewarding read.