Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 33: What Went Wrong?
Summer 1990
The first chilling account of the darker side of Europe’s Revolution of 1989. William McPherson in Romania during the brutal six months ‘after’ communism. Plus: Victoria Tokareva, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Isabel Allende, Christa Wolf, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (part one).
From this Issue
Art & Photography|Granta 33
Art & Photography|Granta 33
In Romania
William McPherson
‘The images of the Romanian revolution – I had seen it on television in Berlin – were still vivid in my mind.’
Art & Photography|Granta 33
Art & Photography|Granta 33
Children’s Section, Gradinari House
Isabel Ellsen
‘Gradinari House is thirty kilometres from Bucharest. One hundred and fifteen children live here.’
Fiction|Granta 33
Fiction|Granta 33
Dry Run
Victoria Tokareva
‘My address book is overpopulated, like a communal apartment during the post-war housing shortage.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 33
Essays & Memoir|Granta 33
Europe in Ruins
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
‘At the end of the Second World War Europe was a pile of ruins, not merely in a physical sense; it seemed totally bankrupt in political and moral terms.’
Hans Magnus Enzensberger on Europe after the Second World War.
Fiction|Granta 33
Fiction|Granta 33
What Remains
Christa Wolf
‘The coffee has to be strong and hot, filtered; the egg not too soft; home-made preserves; black bread.’
Fiction|Granta 33
Fiction|Granta 33
Bolivia, 1970
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘There is a demonstration on the other side of La Paz.’
Art & Photography|Granta 33
Art & Photography|Granta 33
Bolivia, 1990
Ferdinando Scianna
‘Photographing these people I came to realize that their lives are dominated by fear: fear of old galleries falling, of dynamite, of the spirits trapped in the mine, of tuberculosis, of the disappearance of veta (the wolfram seam), of the future.’
Fiction|Granta 33
Fiction|Granta 33
Gift for a Sweetheart
Isabel Allende
‘Horacio Fortunato was forty-six when the languid Jewish woman who was to change his roguish ways and deflate his fanfaronade entered his life.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 33
Essays & Memoir|Granta 33
Summers with Juliet
Bill Roorbach
‘At eight I was interested in fishing, reading and the diligent scavengering of fabulous pieces of glass and metal and, sometimes, wood.’
Fiction|Granta 33
Fiction|Granta 33
A House in the Country
Romesh Gunesekera
‘The nights had always been noisy: frogs, drums, bottles, dogs barking at the moon.’
Fiction|Granta 33
Fiction|Granta 33
Time’s Arrow
Martin Amis
‘I came rushing upward out of the blackest sleep to find myself surrounded by doctors.’