Matei Visniec
Biography
Matei Visniec made his debut as a poet in the 1980s and went on to become a playwright. His plays have crossed borders, having been translated into more than thirty languages, and he has topped the bill in more than forty countries. His plays are among the most frequently performed at the Avignon Theatre Festival. Since 1990 he has been a journalist for Radio France Internationale, and he divides his time between France and Romania. In 2008, Cartea Romaneasca published his first novel, The Café Pas Parole, written in 1983. He followed the novel with Panic Syndrome in the City of Lights, one of the best rated novels of 2009 and recipient of the Observator cultural Prize. In 2010 his novel Mr K. Released was published : although written in 1988, during the author’s first...
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Novel, Prose series, Cartea Romaneasca, 2016, 512 pages Book presentationThe typology Matei establishes in the title of his latest novel also includes the reader. There are shoe type readers and umbrella type readers. The shoe type reader is disciplined, patient, he has faith in the author, he begins a book from the first words and finishes it when he reaches the last sentence, without skipping so much as a comma. The umbrella type reader views plays on words with unease, he skips some passages and returns to others, some passages he reads slantwise, going deeper only if something captures his imagination, and more often than not he finishes a book at its start. |
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Novel, Prose series, Cartea Romaneasca, 2013, 336 pages Book presentationA parabolic novel about literature and the writer, and above all about how the present “devours” literature and the writer, drags him down into the vortex of the constantly new, of the undiscovered, of the eternal beginning. The author seemingly draws you into a collage of openings to novels, into stories that fascinate you just because they leave you waiting for an ending that never arrives. But it is precisely this wait that gradually becomes the long-awaited ending, it becomes a finality, it becomes understood. Overall, there is a story that links the beginnings, and this story is about literature, about the specific way in which you relate to a story and about the condition of the contemporary writer. The third annual Augustin Fražila Literary Prize, 2014 |
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Novel, Cartea Romaneasca, 2011, 280 pages Book presentationConvicted of an unspecified, nebulous crime, imprisoned for many years in a penitentiary with mysterious subterranean ramifications, where he proves to be a patient and conscientious prisoner, Kosef J. is released one morning, without wanting to be, without being told why, without even being informed what his ‘being free’ will mean. As he waits to meet the director of the gaol, a meeting that is endlessly postponed, Mr K. discovers, to his stupefaction, the environs of the penal colony. As they traverse a concentric series of Kafkaesque worlds together with the ‘privileged’ protagonist, readers of the novel might, paradoxically, feel at home. A literary and philosophical fable, Mr K. Released is a homage to Franz Kafka, but it is no less an extraordinary parable of Romanian communism and of man caught in the toils of a system that was seemingly more absurd than anything even Kafka could have imagined. |
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Novel, Prose series, Cartea romaneasca, 2011, 264 pages Book presentationThe central character of the novel Preventative Disorder is a young journalist who discovers the excesses and delirium of the media machine in a Paris press office. He allows himself to be initiated into techniques of manipulation by an older colleague, George, a man in the grip of a kind of metaphysical disgust. One night, an overly friendly rat turns up in the press office and seems to be trying to initiate a dialogue with the human race… During an assignment to Luxembourg to report on a European Union summit, the young journalist is surprised to discover that the proceedings are dedicated to “good neighbourliness with rats.” Human consumer society has reached crisis point and only the rats, which offer their services as living garbage disposal units, can save mankind’s lifestyle. And the best news the human race has ever received is that the rats are willing to mop up not only man’s material squalor, but also his moral squalor. |
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Novel, Proza series, Cartea Romaneasca; Publishing House, 2009, 312 pages Book presentationAfter the success enjoyed by the republished novel Pas Parole Café, Matei Vişniec returns to prose with a new novel. This time, the centre of the world shifts to the Saint Medard Café – an agora of letters, a contemporary Tower of Babel, whither gravitate only authors and characters. An entire universe presided over by a French publisher without a publishing house, Monsieur Cambreleng, who, worn out by reading the manuscripts he receives, the hundreds of pages of words written by authors avid for literary glory, in a world in which sound and image are supreme, decrees the death of words. His primary passion is now collecting dead books, which fill bookshops that have become abattoirs, due to readers blind and deaf to the suffering and tears of unread books.
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