Reading had been frowned on in Romania
during the communist era. The
celebration of the book there was largely started in the early post-communist
period by Mihai Oroveanu, “a remarkable cultural figure and a spectacular
photographer of late-socialist urban reality”.
This led to Bookarest, a chaotic but stimulating book fair.
In the early days it was dominated by
essayists and philosophers. These
individuals had grouped around Constantin Noica, an ex-fascist, in the 1970s
and 80s and they became influential cultural figures themselves post-1989. Contemporary Romanian literature gained
prominence domestically after 2000, prior to which literary interests had
turned to what had previously been forbidden, primarily western fiction and
erotica. The best known of the
contemporary writers are Herta Müller and Mircea Cărtărescu.
Müller, born in Romania but based in
Germany and writing in that language, only became known in Romania after
2000. She achieved a profile in the
country when her books were translated into Romanian, and used it to criticise
the old communist regime, including its literary apologists. Her critics feted Cărtărescu as a
counterweight to her, and his reputation grew as his books were translated; his
name was frequently mentioned as worthy of the Nobel Prize when Müller won it
in 2009.
Book fairs, with Bookarest in spring and
now Gaudeamus in the autumn, have grown in importance since the 1990s. They attract visitors from overseas in large
numbers, with both established writers and new names present, and they have
retained their relevance despite the growing importance of the internet as a
publishing outlet.
Source: TLS, 13 December 2016
(This was first published on The Joy of
Mere Words, 9 April 2018)
