HOTEL EUROPE and the Exiled Dream
HOTEL EUROPE and the Exiled Dream

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I try to highlight the ambiguous voice of the writer Dumitru Țepenag, passing from author to auctor, in his exile through a Europe where characters are as “flags” on the map, moved from time to time, having no destiny or a clear direction. In his almost oneiric way, the writer tries to put together lives balanced between two worlds: on one hand, there is the world where meanings are so worn-out that they cannot convey anything any longer, and, on the other hand, there is the world of abstruse symbols that also fail to make sense. Hotel Europa is this passage where the two worlds collide, opening up a space that resembles the twilight zone. In this Hotel, as in any other, the most legible elements are the labels, the clichés, the points identified on a map (the cities where the characters are wondering: Budapest, Paris, München). Romanians (along with other East European figures) are walking through the “good” Western world bearing the clichés that Europe has fabricated about them: disabled beggars, cheaters, pimps, Gypsies. The “conclusions” appear rather quickly: for the writer, who is also a character in the novel, Romania is this “pathetic country full of misbehaving” and “the genius of the Romanian people” lies in “humour and transhumance. We're all nomad comedians.” Only a myth can make sense in this collage. The text becomes a way of surrendering to the impossibility to make a “realistic story” about Hotel Europe and the way people live in it.

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