Bucharest
Busy just being there…
Mircea Cărtărescu (1956-), one of the leading figures of contemporary Romanian literature, lamented once that while Jorge Luis Borges had Buenos Aires to inspire him, he only had Bucharest. Be as it may, the city motivated several of Cărtărescu's books. And he is not the only one to benefit from the impact. Bucharest seems to have a way of inflicting itself on writers and wreaking havoc with their senses like the proverbial grain of sand irritating the oyster and thus driving it to build a defensive pearl around it. Many pearls have resulted from this love-hate relationship between the city and its writers. Filip Florian and Matei Florian, Daniel Bănulescu, Ion Manolescu, Bogdan Suceavă, Stelian Tănase, Doina Ruşti, Claudiu Komartin, Maria Manolescu, Călin Torsan, Cosmin Manolache, Ana-Maria Sandu, to name but a few, have contributed their fair share of prose and poetry encapsulating the idiosyncratic Bucharest mood. Still alive and kicking after long decades of chaotic communism and a head-on collision with capitalism, Bucharest is such stuff as literary dreams are made on – elusively stolid and brutally candid, it never fails to inspire.
Romanian Literature on Wikipedia
Bucharest on Wikipedia
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Using photography and music from our multi-talented Word Express writer-travellers, we've put together this short slide show with music from Ivan Hristov's band Gologan.