Writing about Romania - part II novels

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 20^th 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

• They Were Counted 
• They Were Found Wanting ; and
• They Were Divided 

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