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Notes From A Tunnel
http://notesfromatunnel.blogspot.com
Trees sprayed over with green paint to look fresh, fields filled with truckloads of frozen vegetables to appear rich from the distance, whenever the Leader drove past them during his visits. Three hours of TV broadcasts per day, in-between powercuts… Overcrowded desolation of grey concrete deserts built to host innumerable communist blockflats… Learning languages, so that during evenings spent in the dark, one could listen to a battery-powered radio, to voices of foreign stations airing fascinating and dangerous truths… Treating a kid’s asthma, while denying the existence of more lethal but deemed ‘imperialist’ diseases… Ears, too many of them, as if painted around us by Bosch, listening out for any accidental voicing of free thought. Paranoia did mean survival – even for a small child, hardly able to understand the forces governing the surreal around him.
Then… the Romanian Revolution of 1989… An explosion of possibilities, indiscriminate copying of the ‘West’, a vacuum of power...
Chapters, with minimalist titles ranging from ‘Light’ through ‘Food’ to ‘Metal’, from ‘Revolution’ through ‘Power’ to ‘Choice’, take the reader on a journey from a strange past to a familiar, but alarming present, from a world, that Kafka imagined but Ceausescu created, to a society going through changes at unnatural and traumatising pace. It is a personal journey, but also a wider analysis of abrupt social and political changes still reverberating across Eastern Europe.
- Added on: Sep 23rd, 2007
- Country: United Kingdom
- Language: English
- Author: Levente
- Listed in: Culture Non-Fiction
- Tags: revolution communism dictatorship totalitarianism cold-war regime
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