The Disappearance of the Outside

Codrescu, Andrei

ISBN 10: 0201121948 / ISBN 13: 9780201121940

Published by Addison Wesely, 1990

About this Item

Reading. 1990. Addison Wesely. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0201121948. 216 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Gary Koepke. keywords: Europe Romania American Literature. DESCRIPTION - When an excerpt from this book first appeared, The Nation called it a remarkable essay the sort of social-cultural-political analysis the mind longs for when it's been fed for months on Wonder Bread while roaring for raw meat.' This analysis could only have come from Andrei Codrescu: born in Stalinist Romania, exploring the world during the turbulent 1960s, and now an American poet, essayist, and commentator. In the late twentieth century, he writes, people fear the Outside - that which holds everything beyond our control and current understanding. We yearn to escape into the familiar, not into the unknown. Minds are no longer open to mystery. The rulers of the Eastern bloc tried to close off the Outside with barbed wire and censorship, driving away creative minds. An exile himself, Codrescu looks at Czeslaw Milosz, whose literary Lithuania has become more famous than the region itself; Vāclav Havel, recently a prisoner of the Czechoslovak state and now its leader; Milan Kundera, who sought a free press and now refuses all interviews; and many other authors who fled and fought oppression. Now popular revolutions are bringing East and West together. Codrescu was once so unwelcome in Romania that his name could not appear in crossword puzzles; in December 1989, he relates, he returned and was invited to go on national television. Yet here in the West, Codrescu points out, the Outside is blocked by billboards, drowned out by commercials. There is free expression, but can we really think about what anybody says? What will flow eastward through the cracks in the Iron Curtain - freedom of thought or freedom to shop'? Part memoir of crossing East and West, part critique of our current world literature, and part jeremiad against how we ignore imagination as a force in our lives, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE OUTSIDE is an extraordinary piece of writing that holds challenges for years ahead. inventory #14899.

Seller Inventory # z14899

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Disappearance of the Outside
• Publisher: Addison Wesely
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201121948
• ISBN 13: 9780201121940
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good in Dustjacket
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

The author recounts his life in Romania and in America, relating his thoughts on revolution, freedom, and the world today

Reviews

Instead of McLuhan's rosily interactive global village, essayist and poet-provocateur Codrescu, National Public Radio commentator, sees emerging a "new electronic globe" that stifles human creativity, thought and imagination. In "shopping-mall America," reality is continually manufactured and people are becoming mere appendages of engines and gadgets. In the totalitarian East, the crude hand of the state intervenes, though Codrescu saw signs of progress during a visit to his native Romania, where TV "literally woke up the country" as Ceaucescu's execution was aired on screens that the dictator once controlled. Codrescu argues in these acute if alarmist essays for a rebirth of the imagination, with a nod to surrealism and Dada. Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, Burroughs, Kafka, Garcia Marquez and Ted Berrigan are points on his literary compass as he maps a terrain where life seems increasingly devoid of meaning. (June) this clause and this phrase unclear to me.eed/eliminate this part--pick up from below 'Codrescue argues in etc.--if the beginning of sent. gives you oblems;otherwise leave as is:meaning that Ceaucescue was Dracula and now that he is eliminated there is a surge of nationalism, and in the West, as we state earlier in review, our reality is manufactured, making for programmed nonreality.gs
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"I am writing this literally in the ruins of the Communist world, in my hometown of Sibiu, Romania," writes Codrescu at the beginning of his 21st book, a long, uneven essay of at times pontifical statements by a minor poet whose contributions to his adopted country, while often interesting, are usually unexceptional. Like some emigres from Central or Eastern Europe, especially those who lack the talent or the reputation of, say, a Solzhenitsyn or a Kundera, Codrescu takes America to task for its superficiality, its lack of some quality seemingly found only where a lack of personal freedom ensures the primacy of the word over the image. Readers who feel the need to read Codrescu will be better served by his poems.
- Vincent D. Balitas, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.