Romanian history and literature

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Fall of Ceaușescu in 1989 ended 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. How did the experience of living through that make its way into fiction? Georgina Harding published In Another Europe: A Journey To Romania in 1990 and followed that with a novel The Painter of Silence, set in Romania of the 1950s. Mircea Cărtărescu was born in 1956 and has published novels, poems and essays. In the novel Nostalgia published in 1989, he looks at communist Bucharist in the 80's, in a dreamlike narrative seen in part through the eyes of children and young adults. Philippe Sands has chronicled Jewish histories in Eastern Europe in his books and podcast series The Ratline. He recommends Mihail Sebastian's book For Two Thousand Years.

Producer: Ruth Watts

You can find a playlist called Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking website which contains other conversations organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can I just say?
0:01.5	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
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0:05.6	So nice.
0:06.5	There are loads more like it on BBC sounds.
0:08.8	Different paces, different heights.
0:10.6	The roof is buckling.
0:11.9	Where you can also listen to live sports commentary.
0:14.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
0:16.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:21.7	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:25.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:26.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
0:29.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.7	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:35.8	BBC Sounds, music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:40.5	Hello, I'm Anne McHawoy, and in this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast,
0:45.2	we'll be talking about a European country and an impressive literature that two few
0:49.6	British readers have encountered. Curious yet? Well, find out more about what you might have been missing
0:55.4	after this. Hello, I'm Eleanor Rosamund Barclough, and I'm here to tell you about the Green
1:01.5	Thinking podcast. In the run-up to COP26, we're releasing 26 programmes exploring research
1:08.1	and ideas about the climate and nature emergency, whether it's looking into the
	...

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