” – Andreea Petrini, a relative of Victor Petrini. Yes. I do not know whether you are old enough to know him but he is the greatest uncle there ever was.
– Petrini? I think I know that name…
– He is my uncle – he was the ministry of industry during Ceausescu’s time…
– Well, then I don’t know him.
That’s what I said…”
As you may have guessed, Andreea Petrini is not Andreea Petrini, the relative of Victor Petrini, ministry of the “Love empire” during the “reign” of Ceausescu (main character of “Cel mai iubit dintre pamanteni” – Most loved on Earth – perhaps the best novel of the ’80s).
Our heroine has a different name. When she was in college she found an add on the wall, offering jobs at an erotic hotline. She had to work to live so she took it. It was a special experience and she believes that it was beneficial for her: “I became uninhibited, both mentally and literary.” Her novel will be constructed as a conversation made of lines that “Andreea” heard and used as an employee of the hotline company. She used to write down all the interesting lines she came up with or overheard. The dialogues, the stories, the online “romances” are almost real. “All my work started as a bet with the other girls who worked there. They said I couldn’t “deliver” that my performance would be hindered by the fact that I came from a family of intellectuals and I was a student. They feared that I was too ‘pampered and used to taking things for granted” but they did not realise that character and education have nothing to do with the amount of money one has or can get.”
This novel will be part of the larger current of “young feminine novel,” it resembles the style of Claudia Golea and Jolan Benedek with a subject that has as starting point a young girl set out to discover the world, a harsh environment that she has to conquer to survive. This young assault is not yet apparent because the older authors currently occupy the literary scene. “Except for a few groups of young writers, the ‘consecrated’ authors are still ruling the literary world and they, in turn are ruled by an exacerbated self-consciousness and pseudo-decency.”
Andreea (let us call her that because she prefers to keep her anonymity for the time being) likes new and fresh things – “I think that everyone should write what they imagine no one else could. As for myself – I was just lucky that this side of literature – eroticism – was not sufficiently exploited by Romanians and the subject I chose is totally new. Even though the subject is still an uncharted territory, the tools that I chose to mold it with are the same as everybody else’s and it is easy to fall prey to the cheap and vulgar. I think I managed to stay away from that.” Andreea’s novel is something I look forward to. This is the proper way to fight for supremacy in literature. Honesty and bravely.