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Editorial Review Book Description
More than any other study of Cioran, Marta Petreu's intensive investigation of his life and work confronts the central problem of his biography: his relationship with political extremism. The scene of Cioran's excesses is Romania and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, a time of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, Nazism, and Stalinism. Norman Manea's Foreword reminds us of Cioran's stature in Western intellectual circles and explains the critical importance of An Infamous Past. ... Read more Customer Reviews (4) 
Reading this is like listening to a broken record
The book is excellently researched (kudos to the author, Marta Petreu). However, even the best biographer must find it difficult to summarize someone like Emil Cioran, who had trouble organizing his own words into a coherent text. Reading about the articles and books he wrote is like listening to a broken record: I'm ashamed to be a Romanian. Romania will never become a culture (nation). They can't blame anyone but themselves for being a total historic failure. On and on.
The author did a great job of trying to present his one-track exposition (though he changed trains of thought in his later life). Actually, the best summary of Cioran's youthful, radical philosophy was given near the end of the book, when Marta organized his words into his "confession."
In spite of its drawbacks (Cioran was, after all, only a "bit player" in the generation of 1927 compared to Mircea Eliade or even professor Nae Ionescu), it's a book that's worth reading. I especially enjoyed Chapter 10 ("Cioran and the Ideologies of His Time"), which compared the thoughts of others in his generation to those of Cioran.
Before I read the book, I had no positive or negative thoughts about Cioran. After I read the book, I grew to dislike the guy who sponged off of others, refusing to work, pretending to be an intellectual. But I guess these were the kind of people who made a difference in inter-war Romania. And worth reading for that reason.
Cioran's apology
"An Infamous Past" concentrates on Cioran's early days and his infatuation with the legionary movement and its rise and effect on Romania's intelligentsia in the 1930's.
While the book is excellent, and Marta Petreu has performed both impressive research and drawn reasonable conclusions, the translation by Bogdan Aldea (who incorrectly translates "Totul Pentru Tara" as "Everything for the Fatherland" (the word "patria" means fatherland while the word "tara" means country), and the failure to acknowledge Codreanu's eventual abandonment of antisemitism and violence as a means (both actions which perpetuate a distortion of Romanian history), earn this book a one star demerit.
The Best Book on Cioran in English
The Chicago publisher Ivan R. Dee has already published one major Romanian book in English translation, Mihail Sebastian's JOURNAL 1933-1945.Petreu's book is something different--a clear, serious, and straightforward scholarly study, a type of book seldom undertaken by an American commercial publisher.It is well chosen, though its future depends entirely on the reputation of Cioran, and it will do little to enhance that reputation.
Petreu is intimately familar with Cioran's writings, and quotes from them liberally.That alone would make this book an important source for readers of Cioran who cannot read Romanian.She has also troubled to read his 1930s journalism and his correspondence (some of which she has collected and published in Cluj), texts unavailable in English.There is some repetitiveness, but with good reason.
Petreu also is a student of history and is able to place Cioran's "lyrical philosophy" and praise of fascism (and of Hitler) in the context of Romanian politics.This by no means excuses Cioran.Rather, Petreu shows how and why fascism appealed to him in his twenties, when his literary ambitions, his dismay at European contempt for Romania, and his faith in destiny converged in opportunistic rant.Later in life, Cioran bitterly regretted these years.Petreu provides the ugly details, showing how much he had to regret.
Finally, her discussion of the Iron Guard, the blackshirts of Romania, who murdered and marauded in the name of pure Christianity, is a frightening reminder of what militant Christian politics can do.
Petreu writes that Cioran's "fundamental nature--decadent, amoral, aesthetic" (p. 182) was a fertile ground for his commitment to Romanian fascism.Cioran's current fame as a writer and a philosopher rests on the books he published in Paris after World War II.Petreu's book provides vital background for his Parisian career, showing how his fascist years continued to affect his later work, sometimes with hints, often with suppression, and always with fear and revulsion.
Brilliance and Evil often go together
Wagner is the Western Archetype of the Evil, ugly person who creates what is in the opinion of many great Art. Cioran is another example. Carlin Romano in a concise and powerful review of this book which appears in the 'Daily Chronicle of Higher Education' traces Petreu's uncovering of Cioran's Nazi past. She exposes his identification with murderous barbarity even against his own Romanian people.
Cioran's Nazi past was covered up in the Post- War years when his aesthetic flamboyance made him an intellectual star. But even in the stardom there were common elements with the old Nazi sympathizer. Misanthropy, a hatred of anything which seemed to not share his own distorted view of things.
This book exposes a certain double-sidedness in Cioran , on the one hand anadmiration for Jewish creative powers, and on the other a vicious anti -Semitic fear of alleged Jewish spoiling of ' pure national cultures'.
Cioran according to Romano spend most of his life in Paris leeching off friends , and diatribing against among others fellow Romanians. He seems to have been a singular unpleasant character , and one who like Nietzsche profited in literary terms, from the human love of spiteful things said against other human beings.
Without knowing anything about his Nazi pastI tried very hard years ago to read his work, and found myself running up against a tremendous amount of strongly declarative unproved utterance, aphorisms at their worse.
This book gives us a Cioran of mostly warts. The rest would advisedly be silence.
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