…semnalez cu bucurie o excelenta recenzie a lui Costica Bradatan (profesor de filosofie la Texas Tech University), aparuta in The Globe and Mail (probabil cel mai serios ziar din Canada), prilejuit de aparitia cartii The Appointment, de Herta Muller. Faptul mi se pare cu atat mai demn de remarcat cu cat in majoritatea timpului discutam cu patos despre provincializarea culturii romane. In realitate, lucrurile se schimba sub nasul nostru, fara sa ne dam seama. Incet-incet intram in circuitul universal. Redau mai jos doar cateva fragmente, pentru a va deschide apetitul:)

The evil of banality

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Herta Müller last year, some criticized the choice on the grounds that there was something political about it. They were right, I think. But they were right for different reasons: Müller’s work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. Hers is a work where the aesthetic and the political fuse in such a way that one is incomprehensible without the other. Sometimes “telling the truth” can be a distinctly political gesture, and in Müller’s work both “telling” and “truth” are so important that, in a way, storytelling is for her truth-telling. Hence its tremendous importance for charting the disastrous history of 20th-century Europe.

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There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that’s rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail.” Terror can be mediocre, even idiotic, yet omn