TRANSVERSE RADIOGRAPHS. CRITIQUE OF THE NOTION OF PERIPHERY. RADU PAVEL GHEO, DISCO TITANIC
TRANSVERSE RADIOGRAPHS. CRITIQUE OF THE NOTION OF PERIPHERY. RADU PAVEL GHEO, DISCO TITANIC

Summary/Abstract: The beginning of the tenth decade registers a distancing from non-fictional literature and miserable realism, in favor of an increasingly meaningful approach to fiction. In this context, the discussions focus on a new generation made up of prose writers such as Dan Lungu, Florin Lăzărescu, Lucian Dan Teodorovici and many others, including Radu Pavel Gheo, one of the topical prose writers, essayists and translators of the period, of whose novel, Disco-Titanic, becomes the reference point of an alternative cultural history. The novel provides the reader with a complex story, in which well- individualized characters participate, beyond which a certain amount of mystery is interwoven, creating suspense. The main issues on which the whole speech is based are precisely the traumas of the civil war in Yugoslavia and the separatist manifestos in Banat, the author trying to unravel the mystery that allowed such a tragic history. Despite the territorial and temporal distance from the significant events, the consequences of a turbulent past left their mark on future generations, visibly affecting their existence. By perfectly combining reality with allegory, fiction, hyperrealism and the fantastic, in the account of the key moments of Romania and the Eastern part of Europe, from the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the next, it is possible to attach the concept of narrative art to writing. The epic-solid construction of the novel that presents two stories, on the one hand the Romanian one, of Vlad, and on the other hand the (ex)Yugoslav one of his friends in Split manages to capture very well the phenomenon of rupture between the image of the Yugoslav space from the character's childhood and the present, reconfigured following the extreme violence spontaneously and irrationally exploded in 1990. In this rupture zone, the drastic consequences of the war are acutely felt, which reverberate in all dimensions of existence, Vlad, the central character of the entire creation feeling he was always caught between the world of his childhood and the present in Split. As a result, through the verve of the rendering and through the suspense created by waiting for the details to be revealed, Disco-Titanic is a novel that wants to surprise, recording, at the same time, the author's success in illustrating the transition between two spaces of incompatibility, which contributes to missing the central character of the novel.

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