Mihail Sebastian, _For Two Thousand Years_, trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh

CLASSIFIED AS A novel, but "similar in style and tone" to Sebastian's published journal for 1935-44 (which I have not read, but hope to). This covers an earlier period--early 1920s to early 1930s, I think. The unnamed narrator (if we can call him that--the episodes are mainly description and dialogue, and the book has no plot to speak of) is a young Romanian man at the university. His friends and acquaintances are if anything a bit more vividly presented than he presents himself; apparently they are portraits of other young Bucharest intellectuals of the 1920s, such as E. M. Cioran and Mircea Eliade.

The atmosphere is highly reminiscent of the journals of Robert Brasillach, or novels like Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's Gilles or Heimito von Doderer's The Demons: young, highly intellectual young men in European capitals during the interwar years, colliding like bumper cars, intoxicated with ideas, oscillating between enthusiasm and disdain, flirting with authoritarian ideas, convinced their generation is on the lip of an enormous upheaval.

Sometimes at the professor's course I feel like we're gathered together in a kind of ideological headquarters of an immense world war, waiting from hour to hour for telegrams about the catastrophe, dreaming of the new world that will be born from its ashes.

The abyss-opening difference is that Sebastian, or his proxy, is Jewish. However fascinating he finds nationalist authoritarianisms, he is, for them, irredeemably other. Not that he does not sometimes sound more anti-semitic than the anti-semites.

    I would criticize anti-Semitism above all, were it to permit me to judge it, for its lack of imagination: "freemasonry, usury, ritual killing."
    Is that all? How paltry!
    The most basic Jewish conscience, the most commonplace Jewish intelligence, will find within itself much graver sins, an immeasurably deeper darkness, incomparably more shattering catastrophes.
    All they have to use against us are stones, and sometimes guns. In our eternal struggle with ourselves, we have a subtle, slow-working but irremediable vitriol in our own hearts.

Anti-semitic violence breaks out frequently in For Two Thousand Years, and it is all the more horrifying knowing where it was going to go and what is was going to do a few years after the novel's publication in 1934. Wanting to know how Sebastian saw the rise of the Iron Guard is one reason why I hope to find a copy of Journal 1935-1944, but the other reason is that the writing is superbly good.