L ’impossible retour : écrire l’exil postcommuniste dans la littérature roumaine francophone

Abstract

Dumitru Ţepeneag’s novel Hotel Europa (1996) and Matei Visniec’s Despre sindromul de
panică în oraşul luminilor (2009) have as protagonists writers that left Romania for France before 1989
and that become aware of the impossibility of either building a literary career in their adoptive country or
returning to their native country after the 1989 Revolution. This paper sets out to examine a double
experience of failure: personal (analysing the identity splits the experience of exile determines) and
professional (both Hotel Europa and Despre sindromul... have a strong metafictional dimension, musing
over the painful process of writing... in one’s mother tongue). However, I will argue that the two novels are
the expression of a paradoxical come-back, as they mark the return of Ţepeneag and Vişniec to writing in
Romanian.