2023-10-20 11:40:33
Lisbeth Koutchoumoff Arman Published on October 20, 2023 at 1:40 p.m. Modified on October 20, 2023 at 1:42 p.m.
Dana Grigorcea has been thinking regarding vampires for several years. To their unsuspected but very real presence in all strata of society, to the thousand faces they can take whatever the era or the country in which they operate. It is neither in Romania where she was born, nor in Zurich where she lives that the idea of Those who never die came to him. The trigger happened in the United States, in Seattle to be exact. Dana Grigorcea was then, in 2019, on a major tour of American universities and bookstores for a previous book, An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence (“an instinctive feeling of innocence”), not yet translated into French.
In this novel, a woman leaves Zurich to return to live in Bucharest, the city of her childhood. After suffering the robbery of the bank where she had found a job, she is on leave, haggard, wandering the streets of the Romanian capital, unrecognizable since the fall of Ceausescu. Feelings of belonging, of inner exile, of intimate fragmentation intertwine, just like scenes from the past and the present. “I realized that readers, wherever they are, recognize themselves in this state of loss of emotional reference points felt when faced with a city that is transforming. In India, I was told several times that I had written an Indian novel,” Dana Grigorcea tells us in the Zurich café, with very high ceilings and opera red armchairs, where we joined her.
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