One could sense English
is not Florin Grancea’s native language as his well written first person
autobiographical narrative takes the reader deep into the historical Communist
mindset in The Pigs’ Slaughter. Grancea uses many short
sentences, mostly factual statements without embellished adjectives; nothing
more - nothing less than necessary, analogous to the subsistence of the
Romanian population back in the latter part of the 1900’s. This gives
The Pigs’ Slaughter a “foreign” written voice into a form with
credibility enabling the reader to understand the author’s feelings, the
historical significance and his emotions; all “foreign” to people not exposed
to this culture and way of life growing up in the United States.
To slaughter a pig for a
family’s Christmas feast and to provide food throughout the months to come, you
need a rope, a bucket to collect the blood and a sharp knife. The
pig is a smart animal, smarter than a family dog, and knows very well what is
about to happen when being approached for the kill. Florin Grancea uses a
raw description, journalistic in style, of how the pig is killed, drained of
blood and dismembered. The articulation of a pig’s death is compared
to young Romanian soldiers massacred by their ruler Nicolae Ceausescu, in
a far less humane fashion. The levels of lies and propaganda presented to
the people behind the Iron Curtain peeled like the onion sliced to be eaten
with pig lard. The many TV images shown on old black and white TVs
to the population in between newsreel footage of the Russian dictator’s photo
ops and travel exploits were stuffed with lies like the smoked sausages stuffed
with spices. The death of the pig, as well as the revolutionary
soldiers, had a grotesque reality, a stench and a raw uncensored truth, yet
needed to be told.
This is the basis of
Florin Grancea’s historically accurate and compelling story written from the
viewpoint of a young boy observing the culture, actions and consequences of
what was going on within his family and his surroundings during the staged
terrorist uprising leading to the trial and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and
his controlling wife Elena during Christmas of 1989. Grancea builds over the
first 100 pages of the book much detail of the political environment, then
barely took half a page to detail the demise of the tyrants. The
lives of those ancillary to this event are masterfully woven into perspective
bringing both the past of Romania and its future into the then current
situation. Poverty and scarcity were the norm. “When the shops were
empty, and stomachs empty, too, the country’s economy changed into a barter
economy,” Florin Grancea wrote. He said how people would steal this
or that, than barter it and barter what they got even more until food was
finally received. “Even the words used to describe it changed.
Nobody used the word steal anymore. Steal was
negative. So they used complete instead. They
were completing their needs…” he explained.
The Pig‘s Slaughter reveals history in a truly unique
way. Unforgettable in its realism and humanism, this book will be etched
indelibly into your memory and pondered often when some of the circumstances of
history are brought to mind. Florin Grancea gives us all a gift with
his fine work, as his book is destined to seek critical acclaim and many reader
accolades. I strongly recommend this book to young adults so they can
benefit from his view of history they fortunately were not a part of, yet which
shaped the world we now all coexist peaceably. Also, I highly
recommend this to mature readers seeking historical accuracy to past epic
events from the World Wars to the rise and fall of Communism. While reading
this book one learns the lesson that the slaughter of a pig for sustenance is
much more humane than killing people for power.
