Burying the Typewriter

Description

“This story starts roughly in the 1970s a few years after I was born, about the time when I began to have memories and my father’s codename was already long established as ‘Andronic’ a name which we learned about only last summer… “

One day in 1983, though she pleaded with him to stay, Carmen Bugan’s father put on his best suit and drove into Bucharest to stage a one-man protest against Ceausescu. He had been typing pamphlets on an illegal typewriter and burying it in the garden each morning under his daughter’s bedroom window.

With her father in prison and her family under surveillance in their beloved village home, surrounded by microphones and informed on by the neighbours, Carmen was abruptly forced to leave her childhood behind.
Six years later, under threat of death, the family was expelled from Romania. Carmen didn’t expect ever to return. But two years ago she finally travelled back and opened the files.

Burying the Typewriter is the story of an extraordinary upbringing and of an intimate piece of our recent history: a luminous, compassionate book about the price of courage, the pain of exile, and the power of memory.

Author Information

Carmen Bugan is the author of Crossing the Carpathians, a collection of poetry. She was educated at the University of Michigan and Balliol College, Oxford. She lives in Geneva with her husband and two children.