Review: Through a Child's Eyes
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 28, 2013
Gabriela Popa has discovered a transporting method of writing about the magic of being a child and seeing the world through the eyes of a child. In her words, `A few years after I came to US, after a long discussion with my American friends about life in Eastern Europe, I started writing a novel about what meant to be a child in communist Romania. I wanted to understand the child I once was, because I felt that that child held the key to my future. I wanted to understand what it meant to grow up there in the mid-sixties. How were my friends, my schoolmates, how was I able to figure out what was happening around us?  How did we distinguish between bad and good - when they were labeled chaotically?  How was it that we laughed a lot, as children?'  In KAFKA'S HOUSE Popa reveals a gift for writing that assures the reader from the first page that here is an artist who not only expresses herself well in a language that is so innocently childlike, but that she is about to give us all a view of how life in the Communist countries developed and influenced the thinking of the people - primarily through the developing eyes and thoughts of children who had not known life without dictatorship.This is a not a caustic novel, a book filled with disenchantment, a picture of a country degraded by the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. This story is more related to the universal tales of the spectrum of growing up in an environment restrictive by both governmental decree and by low income living no matter where the house and child and school and events of a year take place.It would be difficult to imagine that the main character, the indefatigable Sylvia Cercu age 10, a little girl with a wild imagination, insisting on dreams coming true, curious enough to play at seeking God's assistance in gaining permission to attend a summer camp on the Black Sea in both an Orthodox Church and a Catholic Church, a little vixen unafraid to tease her fellow classmate Florin about his big banded ears as she is to try forbidden `medicine' stolen by her best friend Duck and yet equally as able to perform her child duties such as fetching the ingredients for her mother's soup - it is difficult to think that there is not a lot of Gabriela Popa revealed.So why the title of this book?  It is as simply explained as is the day to day life in Bacau, Romania and yet echoes the wisdom of the writer: Franz Kafka (1883 -1924) was a German-language writer of novels and short stories, born in Prague, whose themes included alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent-child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, and mystical transformations.  We discover from Sylvia that Kafka lived in a tiny `restrictive' house in exotic Prague - a parallel in many ways, though on the level of a child, to Sylvia's existence. It is that sort of multiple levels of meaning that makes this little book so memorable. Originality of writing, depth of intelligence, and freshness of voice - these are the attributes of Gabriela Popa. Grady Harp, January 13