Who do not die

The International Danube Festival Ulm/Neu-Ulm and Kultur auf Stufen present: Those who do not die - reading & talk with Dana Grigorcea

Yes, people are only brave with the weak, but they don't oppose the powerful. Is that fair?" (Those who do not die, page 177)

B. is a place in the mountains, on the border with Transylvania. A health resort that has seen better days, back in the era of Ceausescu's dictatorship. Communism is now a thing of the past and post-communist gloom has spread. The people who are still here are trying to forget the past while mourning it and are ready to capitalise on the temptations of Western capitalism.

B. is also the place where a young Bucharest painter returns after completing her art studies in Paris. The holiday resort of her childhood, where she spent carefree summer holidays with her family in the villa that was first expropriated and then returned to her. In the meantime, B. has become a stranger to the painter. She notices the poverty and hopelessness. Cronyism, corruption and fraud are still the order of the day. She should not stay, but then she discovers a desecrated corpse in the family crypt. Next to the grave of Vlad the Impaler, an ancestor whose blood also flows in her veins and to whom she gradually falls in a vampiresque way. She wants to tell the story of the cruel prince. Memory and time get mixed up and she fears that she might confuse the order of events, but then it becomes clear: "that any order makes sense, because it's not about cause and effect, but only about one thing: fate." With tremendous linguistic power, Dana Grigorcea's novel "Die nicht sterben" (Those Who Don't Die) combines documentary passages, myth, fantasy, irony and a trenchant social analysis.

It is read in several languages.

Dana Grigorcea, born in Bucharest in 1979, studied German and Dutch philology in Bucharest and Brussels. In 2015, she was awarded the 3sat Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition. After years in Germany and Austria, she now lives in Zurich with her husband and children.
https://www.grigorcea.ch/