SOURCE: "Intuitions and Subversions," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4375, February 6, 1987, p. 141.

[Nemoianu is a Romanian-born American educator and critic. In the review below, he comments on Ionesco's concerns and literary method in Non.]

Those who have marvelled at Ionesco's radical experimentalism may not realize that his mature work was actually a toning-down of the much more ferocious radicalism of his youth. At twenty-two he was still in Bucharest. He had read widely, but unsystematically. His intuitions and emotions were surprisingly deep, varied and precise for such a young man, and he had an incredible self-confidence and capacity for challenging whatever was accepted. His first book was called simply No [Non] and more than half of it is a calm and relentless demolition of some of Romania's greatest living writers. These (Arghezi, Barbu, Camil Petrescu) were not venerable traditionalists, but the shining lights of the Modernist wave, often...