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In New York City in 1969, Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian poet just beginning to master the American vernacular, began writing The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius (1975), a memoir of antic Communist youth now recognized as a classic of comic self-creation. "There I was, twenty-three years old, the possessor of a wealth of experience which had already spawned an equal if not greater quantity of mythicizing anecdotes."
Anecdote 1: He was the intellectual love child of Transylvania's great culture heroes, Dracula and Ionesco, twin totems of the Immortal and the Absurd. Anecdote 2: He was a political exile from Communist Europe, and everyone knows that all exiles are geniuses. A later anecdote the one about the enormous file the INS had collected on him and his left-wing Neo-Beat activities provides the subject of the sequel, In America's Shoes (1983), the mock epic of his quest to become a U.S. citizen.
This new book collects both of Codrescu's memoirs, together with the now-middle-aged author's wry notes on the young man who wrote them. While traveling the road from the Balkan forest to the land of the free, he writes, "I never abandoned my rebellious Romanian generation, within which I'd been raised a baby dissident destined for great things and prison. I just put on a cape ' a Dracula cape, with a star-spangled lining ' to complete the picture."
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From Booklist:
Codrescu begins by thanking everyone who has put up with him, and over the course of his chronicle of his remarkable life readers will understand why. A novelist, essayist, and NPR commentator, Codrescu relates his adventures through the lens of feelings rather than facts, producing a series of jazzy riffs written in the third person that lead from his Romanian youth to his peripatetic adventures in the U.S. Codrescu eludes the Romanian police, arrives in New York by way of Rome and Paris under a Persian passport, hangs out with Allen Ginsberg, hits Detroit in time for race riots, and lands in San Francisco at the height of its bohemianism. Much of Codrescu's tale of life as a professional exile is told within a drug fog that would probably be more interesting as experience than as narrative, but throughout his countless reinventions, which include the assumed personas of lesbian poet Maria Parfenie and Puerto Rican poet Julio Hernandez (much to the dismay of Robert Bly), Codrescu remains an original and rebellious spirit and student of the absurd. Suzanne Young
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Publishers Weekly:
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes (and What Happened Afterwards) usefully gathers together two of Andrei Codrescu's earlier memoirs, the 1975 Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius and the 1983 In America's Shoes, along with a new preface and afterword. The earlier memoir is much the best, telling with enormous verve the Algeresque story of how little Andrei Perlmutter, a bright kid growing up in the Stalinist backwater of 1950s Romania, manages to vault himself into the heart of '60s American counterculture as Andrei Codrescu, Transylvanian exotic and man of letters. The second volume is the work of one a little older and wiser, and is a more sober and digressive account. But together the books provide not only a self-portrait of the future poet, travel writer, NPR broadcaster and vampire novelist but a thumbnail history of recent American literary bohemia.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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- PublisherBlack Sparrow Press
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 1574231596
- ISBN 13 9781574231595
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages356
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