Burying the Typewriter A Memoir

by Bugan, Carmen

• ISBN13: 9781555976170
• ISBN10: 1555976174
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-03
• Publisher: Graywolf Press

Summary

Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, a childhood memoir of political oppression and persecution during Romania's Ceausescu years Carmen Bugan grew up amid the bounty of the Romanian countryside on her grandparent's farm where food and laughter were plentiful. But eventually her father's behavior was too disturbing to ignore. He wept when listening to Radio Free Europe, hid pamphlets in sacks of dried beans, and mysteriously buried and reburied a typewriter. When she discovered he was a political dissident she became anxious for him to conform. However, with her mother in the hospital and her sister at boarding school, she was alone, and helpless to stop him from driving off on one last, desperate protest. After her father's subsequent imprisonment, Bugan was shunned by her peers at school and informed on by her neighbors. She candidly struggled with the tensions of loving her "hero" father who caused the family so much pain. When he returned from prison and the family was put under house arrest, the Bugans were forced to chart a new course for the future. A warm and intelligent debut, Burying the Typewriterprovides a poignant reminder of a dramatic moment in Eastern European history.

Author Biography

Carmen Bugan is the winner of the 2011 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Nonfiction, selected by Lynn Freed and awarded by Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is the author of a collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians, and a forthcoming critical study, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile.

Table of Contents

“In Burying the Typewriter, Carmen Bugan delivers neither a memoir of blame nor a hagiography. What she has drawn, within the story of her own childhood, is a complex portrait of an exasperating father, a man who happens to be a hero in the eyes of Amnesty International and the Western World, a hero in the service of a just cause. But, while he may be the driving force behind her story . . .  it is her world that is revealed here, a world she was forced to leave behind and that she looks back on now with sorrow, pride, longing and rage.”--Lynn Freed, Bakeless Prize judge