It’s
important to recognise the various genres which can be used to try to
penetrate the soul of a country. Travelogues may be the easiest but there are
also
- novels;
- histories;
- social and cultural
histories (including jokes);
- memoirs and
diaries;
which
I will cover in this series of posts. The other important genres are
- caricatures and
paintings (most Romanian painters produced marvellous line drawings)
- films
- plays eg Ion Caragiale
- photographs eg Andrei
Pandele’s secretive shots of the 1980s
to
which I will try to do justice in 2014.
Novellists
can presumably give fuller vent to their imagination than other categories of
writers and
Miklos Banffy’s Writing on the wall – The Transylvanian Trilogy gave us a wonderful picture of the privileged slice of Transylvanians living in the first couple of decades of the 20th century .
Miklos Banffy’s Writing on the wall – The Transylvanian Trilogy gave us a wonderful picture of the privileged slice of Transylvanians living in the first couple of decades of the 20th century .
Banffy’s
trilogy was originally published in Hungarian in the 1930s and has taken all of
75 years to become appreciated in the English-speaking world as the literary masterpiece it is - the three books are
Gregor von Rezzori is one of the most neglected of writers from this area which has been variously
part of Austro-Hungary, Romania and now Ukraine.
An Ermine in Czernopol (1958) ostensibly centred on the curious tragicomic fate of an Austrian officer
of supreme ineffectuality gathers a host of unlikely characters and their
unlikelier stories by way of engaging the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience
of a city where nothing is as it appears-a city of discordant voices, of wild
ugliness and sometimes heartbreaking disappointment. Rezzori "summons the
disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world
is seemingly mixed up together, a multicultural society that existed long
before the idea of multiculturalism". This book is effectivelt part of a trilogy - with the other two books appearing in the "memoir" section which follows.
Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy is rather now overshadowed by Banffy’s magnum opus. The first part of Manning’s trilogy focuses on life in Bucharest at the commencement of the Second World War and was produced in Britain in the early 1960s
Novels by Romanian authors focusing on Romania which are worthy of mention include -
- Norman Manea's "Compulsory Happiness" (published in 2012 – but written in the 1980s)
- Mircea Carterescu
Nostalgia (2005 in English – 1993 Romanian) and Blinding
- Nobel prize- winner (but oh so depressive!) Hertha Mueller
- Domnica Radulescu's rather lighter Train to Trieste (2009)
If you want to know more about Romanian writers - then there's a good list of 100 contemporary writers here (although the most famous - Carterescu - is missing!!); and an excellent book Romanian writers on writing (2011) edited by Norman Manea. The link will give you the list of another 100 more classic writers.
Foreign novelists’ works using Bucharest as a location include -
- Dean’s December;
Saul Bellow (1982)
- Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (1982)
- The Long Shadows;
Alan Brownjohn (1999)
- Uncle Rudolf by Paul Bailey (2002)
- The Last hundred Days; Patrick McGuinnes (2011)
- Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (2012)
update; I’ve since come across this ten-page bibliography on writing about....Transylvania
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