LECTURĂ ȘI LITERATURĂ ÎN PROZA LUI ANDREI CODRESCU
Reading and Literature in Andrei Codrescu’s Fiction

Summary/Abstract: Andrei Codrescu, Romanian-born American writer, is well-known for his books of fiction or non-fiction based either on his personal experience as an exile or on a profound understanding of literature. His novels express a permanent fascination for reading and re-reading the great works of literature before him, in his particular case, the act of reading always meaning an original interpretation of “the great books”. Nevertheless, Codrescu did not limit himself at this stage, his novels implying a complicated strategy of masking (or unmasking), and the author includes, therefore, in his texts, some personal memories or personal symbols in order to become himself a part of the narration and one of its key-notes. Taking into consideration all these aspects, we may assume a new kind of interpretation of Codrescu’s novels and also try to underline his originality within contemporary literature. Dreams, consciousness, imagined realities, make up the existence of the narrative voice of Codrescu’s book, Whatever Gets You through the Night, since the author himself is conceived as an imagined personality that has taken on an actual reality, an instantiation of a poet’s self-consciousness. However, the writer seems to invert the process of ironic Socratic dialectic; he does not need Socrates to strip his life of immediacy and even corporeality in order to get him to breathe ethereal air. Instead, Codrescu is quite literally half in the immediate, the real, and half in the “mediate”, the imagined, since he is only half himself. He leaps from imagined sunset to imagined love, asserting a reality he knows he does not have.

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