REVIEW
As I was reading your book, a few names revived ,repeatedly, into my mind: F. Brunea Fox, Geo Bogza, John Dos Passos. You have the rare capacity to suggest without underlining, leaving the reader with the sensation that he discovers alone, the moments signification ,as Fox did it so many times, either speaking about leprosy (as you did it with Tichilestii), or about the ladies from The Cross of Stone.
University Teacher Dr. Tudor Vlad
Grady
ULTIMILE STIRI
By Nichita Danilov
Critic of Art
Monday ,at 6 pm ,at City Hall Iasi took place the launch of book "Latest news", written by Ticu Isari, the manager of television Tele 'M. Portraying the book and the author, the Mayor Constantin Simirad, made a point of the key role ,played by Television Tele’ M in opinion's public, in a very difficult and troubled time of Romanian society, the transition from totalitarian regime to the market economy.
On Mayor's opinion, Tele M was the only television where : "all citizens could express freely their opinions and woes".
Living in the core of the events, in hasten of a new history creation; the author pretends not to be a meticulous chronicler. However, he is certain, and I believe he is right to be, that his album illustrates us the performers of the times ,as they were, are and always be.... The heroes of Ticu Isari's news - children, old people, vagabonds, leprosies, noblemen, kings, politicians, historical personages, policemen, priests, singers, actors, writers, drivers, painters, administrators - they all live in an harsh world, un uproar of a continuous present ,where time elapses quickly and without rhyme, and where the only law is the jungle's.
Unlike them, the scenes from "Ultimile Stiri" are written ,directly ,on the street. They are not produced by the hallucinating mind of a sick writer, but by the quotidian .The reality, where we live. The Sergeant ,Lituma of Llosa, the one who finds a naked black man ,inside an abandoned barn, has a human behaviour. His action is affected by his emotions; he is not reacting like a simple mechanism that moves the truncheon and the boots.
Ticu Isari's sergeants, dispossessed of any feeling, are presented as simple brutes. They do not investigate, but they maltreat the man without asking useless questions. Otherwise, in "Last news" the world is set half-and-half: the brawlers and the beaten. The hangmen and the victims. The shots are atrocious, no matter if they happen at the police station or in the torture room ,from the "Invalid's Cooperative", where the guardians are "deaf and blind and dump" or in the courtyard and the good Christian’s houses .Here are some paragraphs:" The daughter, the son in law and the nephew beat to death Dumitru Dumitresu. On his medico-legal certificate, number 1154 from 28th of March 1997, it writes that the old man, seventy-one years old " was hit with the pitchfork ,the hoe and an axle, by three persons".
Or a more cruel image: Constantin T. Mihai, seventy-one years old, (the majority of Ticu Isari's characters are old people) tells how on 1st of August, this year, at seven o'clock in the night, heard his wife screaming. He goes off his summer warehouse and he sees his son, Neculai, how he is killing the woman with the hook from the fountain. When he saw him, he let go of his mother, with five broken ribs, in a pool of blood and get on his father .He hit the old man until another brother of the brawler and a son of the fallen one, Eugen, who pushed away Neculai and he firmly began to beat him ,until he left his father unconscious. After that, the two brothers, pleased with their work, left, leaving dead the two old people in the courtyard. Of course, if he would investigate, the reporter would find out the cause of the conflict. However, the reporter, equipped himself with the camera, is happy to present the reality from a single point of view, the victim's.