RCINY is pleased to team up with 7 European institutes in NYC in presenting:
HAUNTING THE PRESENT: New Literature from Europe Festival 2010, with Romanian novelist Gabriela Adameşteanu


Today’s Europe is a fascinating blend of modernity and history, with 200mph trains speeding past 1,000-year-old towns. This year’s New Literature from Europe, a yearly festival introducing NYC audiences to contemporary European writers who are garnering critical and public acclaim across the Atlantic, will celebrate this intermingling of the past and present…

In “Haunting the Present,” the festival’s seventh edition, the overriding theme will be the continued sway of history on contemporary life, as authors explore the fascinating blend of modernity and history that so exemplifies Europe, or delve into the deep, dark recesses of their countries’ past.

Gabriela Adameşteanu, one of Romanian’s outstanding writers and political journalists, will join Antonia Arslan (Italy), Philippe Claudel (France), Radka Denemarkova (Czechoslovakia), Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany), Gerhard Roth (Austria), Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), and Kirmen Uribe (Spain) in a series of discussions and readings throughout New York City, guided by American writer André Aciman. Come back to our website to learn more about all the authors, their featured books, and the promising line-up of events, all of which are free and open to the public.

The festival is organized as a collaboration of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Goethe-Institut New York, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the Instituto Cervantes New York, The Czech Center New York, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Romanian Cultural Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute, in the framework of EUNIC – the network of the European Union National Institutes of Culture in NYC, and in partnership with the Center for Fiction and McNally-Jackson Bookstore, Writers Institute - CUNY, Words Without Borders, Brooklyn Rail, and the EU Delegation to the UN.


Gabriela Adameşteanu will present Wasted Morning [Dimineaţă pierdută], "a painful symbol of Romania, sacrificed for a century and a half on the altar of two wars plus communism... in Céline’s oral style, reinventing popular speech and the lyricism of the streets..." (Lire)

At the center of 'Wasted Morning' is Vica Delcă, a simple, poor woman in her 70’s, who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations that was Romanian history from WWI to the end of the twentieth century. She’s a born storyteller, chatting and gossiping tirelessly. But she also listens, so it is through her that Adameşteanu is able to show us a panoramic portrait of Romanian society as the fortunes of its various strata shift violently. Rich or poor, honest (more or less) or deceitful, all of the characters in this polyphonic novel come vividly to life. From Bucharest’s aspirations to be the Paris of Eastern Europe to the darkest days of dictatorship, the novel presents a sweeping vision of the personal and collective costs of a turbulent century.


“Gabriela Adameşteanu distinguishes herself as much through the quality of her writing as through the melancholy of her gaze which sweeps—with a certain brutality—through nearly a century of Romanian history. Reading Dimineaţă pierdută / Wasted Morning one finds oneself thinking how rare it is to meet a writer who so brilliantly demonstrates such compassion for her characters…” – Le Monde 


[Photo by Louis Monier]