Author Q&A: Oana Aristide’s Astronaut!

Oana: Very much so. We really had the frequent blackouts mentioned in the novel and I couldn’t sit still either, so I have the same burn scar as my character Lia, from a toppled oil lamp. It’s difficult for someone who hasn’t grown up in that kind of world to imagine what it was like. People probably think it was like the present world, just worse, but that’s not really it. Especially for children. I mean, I would honestly say I had a happy childhood. There were queues and shortages and I was split up from my parents, but I never experienced violence, for instance, or the burden of responsibility. It wasn’t my problem to put food on the table – I remember liking the chicken claws, whereas I now knowparents were painfully aware that their children were undernourished. 

My understanding of the situation at the time was a bit fairy-taley – yes, there are bad people and, yes, circumstances can be difficult, but I thought I was in some kind of mythical quest to figure out what’s really going on, rather than caught in a fight for survival. Whereas adults under totalitarianism have a completely different experience. Lia is very lucky that communism ended when it did and that she never had to face it as an adult. 

Elise: One of your two protagonists is Lia, an idiosyncratic young girl who has an obsession with colours and colouring in. Please tell us more about how and why. 

Oana: As a child I was obsessed with colour, but I had more or less forgotten about it until much later, when I saw a video shot in Bucharest in the eighties. It shows the main roads, the buildings, the cars, the people. It’s winter and overcast so there’s no blue in the sky or green leaves. I was absolutely sure I was looking at black and white footage until a pale-yellow car appeared in the frame, and even then, I was wondering if it’s not some special effect. It’s that hard to get one’s mind around the fact that there was a place where everything man-made was so grey you could look at a video of the centre of a city of millions and wrongly assume it’s shot in black and white.

I can’t speak for how others felt, but I genuinely hated that lack of colour. And it was obvious even to a child that other places were different – I had classmates who had relatives in West Germany and they were sent toys or other stuff for school. The German objects may as well have been from outer space, that’s how much they stood out. It’s a child’s natural reaction to ask ‘if other places can have more colour, why can’t we?’ And as Lia doesn’t receive a good or honest answer to that question, she keeps probing. 

In general, there were no good answers to many questions back then. 

Elise: Your other protagonist is Constantin, a detective on the trail of a mystery serial killer. His story intersects with Lia’s, initially because the killer’s first victim is her local (very unsavoury) shopkeeper. How did the novel’s dual structure come about? 

Oana: For a long while I was just writing the Lia part of the story. I realized eventually that it’s not fair, or realistic, to show the regime only through a child’s point of view – as I said before, the adult experience is different. There are daily humiliations and daily compromises, and people mostly got through that by pretending not to notice, which is a whole tragedy in itself. So I wanted us to also spend time with a character who is aware of every morally repellent interaction. Constantin is someone who can look at his son and feel the horror of the boy becoming, by necessity, immune to moral thought. Everything in that place was either safe or not safe, whereas plain decency and trust were luxury goods. 

Elise: Detective Constantin invents odd folk tales which he writes in his notebook and reads to his young son. I found myself wondering if these moral tales reflect your own views…?

Oana: Some, not all. I guess I feel they all ask some question worth considering. Mainly they show different ways of dealing with a problem. The little jeweller and the hats, for instance – he does resist oppression, but by playing a very long game. He’s an anti-Lia in that sense. Probably the tale that I feel strongest about is the torches one. The requirement to abandon a sense – or sense in general – is the most totalitarian edict I can imagine. There’s nothing more important than our ability to see and understand the world, nothing more closely bound up with whatever we think of as a soul, so chipping away at that, to me, is horror pure and simple. 

Elise: One time, after Constantin finishes reading to his son, he notices: “The boy giggled a little at the nakedness part, but on the whole the story seems to have made him uneasy. Some stories just are like that.” How far do you take this idea? 

Oana: I think I was getting at the idea that children do sense hidden depths, even if only intuitively. They can tell when a story means more than its literal surface, and when that deeper meaning isn’t reassuring.

Elise: Mass inertia allows authoritarians to prosper. People constantly adjust to incremental degradation. Truths are silenced because of prevailing ideology. What parallels do you draw between the world of your novel and contemporary geopolitics? 

Oana: Every possible parallel. One of the great disappointments of my life was realising that people don’t need ‘a boot forever stamping on their face’ to fall in line with something they sense is wrong. It takes almost nothing, in fact. The world is not short of heroes, the world is short of people at the mildly-uncomfortable-conversations end of things. By the time we need heroes, it’s much too late. 

Oana Aristide: Now and then.

At the same time, the novel is misleading in one respect, because its evil is obvious. In a totalitarian regime, if a person does have a moral impulse, there is little doubt about where to direct it. Normal life is murkier than that, and I think people are too quick to imagine they are safe so long as they are vigilant against one particular ‘-ism’. I don’t think it works like that. There’s no political hack. We are fully capable of messing up the world in a myriad ways. When we feel the warmth of belonging to any kind of ‘ideological’ group – a political party, a movement, a religion – I worry that warmth is the stifling fug of a sealed room. The first moral obligation is to not put ourselves on auto-pilot. To think.

It’s always tempting to think of our politics as expressions of our goodness, or in terms of belonging, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be more constructive to think of it like raising children. Many child-rearing decisions aren’t meant to ‘feel good’ in the moment, they are genuinely difficult and can be unpleasant. Maybe it would be healthy to think of politics like this – they are not our chocolate. They’re our greens, our cod liver oil. They’re very fallible judgements about future consequences, not a treat. 

Elise: The title is Astronaut! Why the exclamation mark?

Oana: The title is a protest message that Lia wrote, and she wrote it with the exclamation mark. I think it also fits the spirit of the book better.

Elise: What can you tell us about your writing life? 

Oana: It’s a cliché to say this, but writing is the most rewarding thing in my life. I suspect that what makes creative work so absorbing is that there’s no end to it. You never master it. Maybe you get a little better at it with time. But you’ll always be on a pretty interesting road.

Elise: What can you tell us about the ‘classic’ (traditional) publishing experience?

Oana: It’s 2026, so anything useful I could say will probably be dated by this time next week. I have no idea what’s coming, except change. 

Elise: You’re working on another novel already. Are you at liberty to talk about it? Please do!

Oana: Ha! I just finished it actually. But please don’t think I’m especially fast. Astronaut! was finished almost three years ago, it just took that long from being signed to being published. I can say that the new novel is the most fun thing I’ve ever written. Shamelessly escapist.

Oana Aristide’s new novel Astronaut! is many things: a political book, a folk tale, a detective story, a sociological study, a memoir of childhood. It’s a riveting read, subtle in its craft, rich in its colours. Available from all the usual bookstores, offline and online, but we do like bookshop.org.