“Shoe loves, umbrella loves” was translated by Ognyan Stamboliev
Matei Vishniec was born under the spiritual sign of Aquarius – in January 1956. He studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest. He worked as a teacher in the village. Since his student days, he participated in a literary circle from which the most important Romanian writers would emerge. They were to form the generation of the 1980s, which shook Romania’s literary and political landscape in the last decade of Ceausescu’s “Golden Age”.
Vișniec also found his way into literature. He was inspired by Kafka, Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Dino Buzzati and Lautréamont – modernists, absurdists, existentialists and decadents. He liked the surrealists, the dadaists. He adored the comedies of Ion Luca Caragiale, considered by literary historian George Călinescu to be the greatest Romanian playwright. But Vișniec went beyond Romania, and not just because he emigrated in the 1980s. In his remarkable work, one can feel the influence of plays by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco – of the theatre of the absurd, of Mircea Eliade’s esoteric fiction, of the magical realism of the Latin American novel, of Anglo-Saxon realist theatre. There is everything but socialist realism!
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Podul prieteniei - Мостът на приятелството - The Bridge of Friendship 