The Bucharest International Literature Festival

România Internațional, 19.12.2015, 14:02

Prominent writers from Turkey, Switzerland, Hungary, Spain ,
the US and Romania participated, between December the 2nd and 4th
in the 8th Bucharest International Literature Festival. The first
evening of the festival offered a literary encounter between two foreign prose
writers born in Romania: György Dragomán of Hungary, one of the most awarded
East European writers of the time and Swiss prose writer Dana Grigorcea, one of
the highly acclaimed writers of German expression.

György Dragomán was born in the central Romanian
city of Targu Mures and settled in Hungary, back in 1988. The first novel
bearing his signature and translated into Romanian is The White King, brought
out by the Polirom Publishers in 2008. This novel won the Tibor Déry and
Sándor Márai Prizes in Hungary and has been translated into over 30
languages. British filmmakers are currently carrying out a project to make a
movie based on this novel in the UK. In 2011, György Dragomán won the Jan
Michalski Literary Prize for the same novel. In 2014, Dragoman published his
third novel The Bone Fire (Máglya in Hungarian), which enjoyed great success
in Hungary and is currently being translated in the US, the Netherlands and
Germany, as a confirmation of the author’s special vision and style which have
already won over the public at large. Ildikó Gábos-Foarţă translated both
György Dragomán’s books into Romanian. I keep thinking that ideas are actually
memories. Ideas and memories come from the same place and this is how the past
is being built. Actually, this book is an exercise in my attempt to built my
personal past and identity, says György Dragoman, referring to his latest
novel, The Bone Fire:

György Dragoman: I’ve asked
myself all sorts of questions and I believe that in the end, the book is the
only answer I was able to formulate. I knew I would write about memory. When I
start writing a book, I start from a concrete image, which lingers in my mind
and it is only afterwards that I use axioms. This time, I’ve used the following
axiom: how can you remember something if you try not to. Can you remember
something if there are no memories?

I didn’t intend to write books based on historical issues,
but books on possible liberties, in a society where freedom shouldn’t exist.
The first 15 years of my life that I spent in Targu Mures are extremely
important to me, says György Dragoman, who will further dwell on his working
method.

G. Dragoman: This is just like a building. I have a
fragment, some images and afterwards every image becomes the nucleus of a short
script. By juxtaposing these images, I manage to make a building. And I feel
just like an architect who makes a building, living inside it. It is only after I have written a third of
my book that I understand how the structure takes shape. And I always make
public fragments of the books I am writing. I choose fragments that can also
function as short prose and I publish them. To me, there is a close relation
between short prose and novels, and I can’t possibly make a clear-cut
difference between the two. A novel can always be developed starting from short
prose. And I also believe that short prose should include just as many
questions and direction lines as a novel.

The prose writer of Romanian descent, Dana Grigorcea, is one
of the budding and highly acclaimed names of the world literary scene. Her
latest novel, Das primäre Gefühl der
Schuldlosigkeit, (The Original Feeling of Innocence) entered the race for
Best Book of the Year in Switzerland, and it won the 3-Sat Prize of the
Ingeborg Bachmann literary contest. .

This seems to be only the
beginning of the novel’s way to success, given the appraisals made by the
best-known German language publications. A captivating portrait of Romania
that culminates with the revolt of the Romanian people in its aspiration for
freedom and change writes Die Zeit. Dana Grigorcea has gone on a tour to
promote her novel Sentimentul primar
al nevinovatiei – The original feeling of innocence and she will next share
with us the reaction of the public in the German space.

TRACK: In Germany, the audience
reacts to reading. People laugh, there are people who hold their breath, and
others get scared, become anxious or are eager to ask questions. In Romania the
audience is quieter. While I was reading, I kept raising my head to see if
there is still anyone in the room because everybody was so quiet. I have read
in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, I have had literary evenings in France
too, and in all these places people are very involved, they manifest their
presence, want to participate. In Bucharest people are just curious to see
what’s going on.

According to Die Presse, the
prose of Dana Grigorcea seems to be painted by thick, courageous, attractive,
opulent and humorous lines. Here is Dana Grigorcea:

The way in which I
perceive my new novel depends very much on the audience. The audience in
Germany reacts differently from that in Switzerland. There is one passage that
I read quite frequently, in which I tell how I became a pioneer, and I can say
that each reading was met with a different reaction. In the former Democratic
Republic of Germany, people react differently from those in Dusseldorf or
Hamburg or Switzerland. There are certain jokes I make in the novel at which
people laugh more in Switzerland than in Austria. There are certain subtleties
which the audiences in Austria perceive quicker than in Switzerland. Therefore,
through my book, I manage to get to know my public and get through to different
mentalities, depending on the place.

The new novel of the
Romanian-born writer Dana Grigorcea speaks about the political change in
Romania seen from the perspective of her childhood memories and from that of
her return to Bucharest, ART-TV notes.