„Living and teaching in Sibiu, a multicultural town in southern Transylvania, the author of this book, an outstandingly gifted scholar, shares the attempt to be <<plural like the universe>>, as one of her favourite writers, Fernando Pessoa, put it. Her interests range wide from the Hispanic to the North-American or European authors, and her analyses are always deep and original, abandoning any constrained approach and choosing to dedicate a lifetime to that form of universalism, which we usually value as global freedom. She is in a constant search for masks, labyrinths and deconstructed, multifaceted realities, which can be found in the only wonder she is always happy to discover: the everyday miracle of world literature.” (Ștefan Borbély, Member of Academia Europaea)
Introduction: Journeys, Books and Open Windows
Rodica Grigore
When Julio Cortázar published his volume entitled „Around the Day in Eighty Worlds” (1967), almost all literary critics considered that the Argentine writer offered his readers some kind of exquisite collage or an unusual intellectual game; and, at the same time, that he provided the perfect example of experimental fiction. And yet what went almost unnoticed was the author’s intention to collect different topics, various styles and aesthetic attitudes, with the aim of challenging all the long-established reading patterns. Obviously, Cortázar also wanted to re-interpret, in a lighthearted manner, what his great French forerunner, Jules Verne, did in his famous novel „Around the World in Eighty Days” (1873): in other words, not to observe, visit or (re)discover the world by means of a conventional journey, but to simply travel around the globe through culture; hence the combination of essays, stories-poems, journal entries or photographs addressing literature and music, art and society.
Bringing together fifty essays on contemporary writers, this volume may be seen as a symbolic map intended to help the reader better understand contemporary literature. With a sometimes playful or ironic and some other times insightful attitude, this collection of texts follows, in a way, as its title suggests, Jules Verne’s example of travelling around the world; this time, symbolically: not in eighty days, but in fifty books—perhaps more like Julio Cortázar, in his „Around the Day in Eighty Worlds”. Our intellectual journey covers a wide cultural space, from Portugal, France or UK to the USA or Japan, reading (or re-reading) modern and contemporary novels, short-stories or memoirs, with the aim of finding new meanings even within certain well-known texts. A thought-provoking approach to contemporary world literature, this book intends to offer original perspectives and a fresh glimpse on nowadays fiction, taking into account literary geography and also a personal interpretation of some relevant writings published in recent decades.
The volume is divided into three parts: „Europe and Europeans”, „Across the Ocean and Over the Seas” and „Journey to the Far East”, each of them including a number of texts dedicated to European, respectively American or Asian writers, covering a wide range of authors, from Fernando Pessoa, Joseph Kessel, Laura Imai Messina and Zülfü Livaneli, to Melanie Benjamin, Delia Owens, Yōko Ogawa or Hiro Arikawa, to name but a few. Of course, these writers and their books reflect my own choices and—in more than a way—they represent my own symbolical journey through a library which can be seen as another (Borgesian) garden of forking paths; but also as a window ready to open towards the multifaceted modern and contemporary literature. Therefore, all the essays in this collection signify, in their specific manner, the expression of a very serious intellectual game, meant to indicate or open new windows (and new paths) towards the others, in order to better understand them—and, at the same time, to completely understand ourselves.
At a certain point, the protagonist in Yōko Ogawa’s exquisite novel „The Memory Police” wonders if a story she authored is meant to be remembered after her physical disappearance and she is assured that each written word will last, even if only in the others’ soul and memory; proof that all people need their story be told and some other stories to help them survive. This is also the indication (and a lucid warning) that we always need reading and writing in order to symbolically find ourselves and (re)found the world around, by means of each new book we come across. Or, as Ogawa herself wrote, „No one can erase the stories…”.
Rodica Grigore, „Around the World in Fifty Books. Collected Essays on Contemporary Writers” (Translated into English by Mirela Petrașcu), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2026.
Sumar Literomania nr. 394 (2026)
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