Bucharesters

Abstract

With meticulous realism, Bucharesters describes the lives of ordinary people living in Ceaușescu’s Romania. The regime is never placed at center stage: we glimpse it in the background in the stultifying conformity, the entrenched power relations, and the tedium of everyday life under those restrictions. At center stage are fundamental human emotions: longing, loneliness, love, insecurity, anxiety, anger, fear, shame, bitterness, and the moments of tenderness, hope, or sudden revelation that fitfully illuminate these ordinary lives.