Fortress on the Shore

by Claudia Ene

Overview

That girl that would devour the books of her age (I can still remember the charm of the tales, of “The last of the Mohicans”, of the children’s poems, “The Laurel Princess” or “The Valaquian Legend”, for example), passed without any struggle, around the age of thirteen, to read Tolstoi because she’d feel that children’s play was a loss of time. Thus she made her first exercise of patience: to resist and finish reading the descriptions of “War and Peace”, or to not know how the novel ends. Since those years, I always write something, anywhere, on any piece of paper, but far less than what I’d like to.
It was a luxury I couldn’t afford, during those times; simply, a river that returns to its riverbed, at the present.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940154644805
Publisher:	Claudia Ene
Publication date:	12/07/2017
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	169 KB

About the Author

Born in 1974, in a small, southern village of Romania, next to the natural border that the Danube makes with Bulgaria, my childhood was a period of mixed emotions, between the happiness of that age, and the fear of living in a communist, dictatorial regime that forbade any expression of free speech and free thinking. When I was 10 years old, my mom decided that it would've be better for my future to move to a city nearby, in order to provide me a better education. For a lot of time, I was convinced that I'll became a doctor. I even prepared for it, since the exams for admittance to the medicine university, at that time, were among the most difficult ones, along with architecture, law and engineering. But then happened the 1989 Revolution and everything changed. Because of my Romanian language teacher, after an exam she gave us, in which we were supposed to comment a poem belonging to Mihai Eminescu, the Cervantes of the Romanian literature, I realized that she was right, that what I really like is to read and to write. So, I started to study English language and Romanian grammar and literature, to prepare for journalism studies, and to recover all the years I had lost without studying these subjects. And since then, it's what I've been doing. After finishing a private journalism school of which I'm proud of, I met my soon-to-be husband in the last two weeks of classes, a fact that, somehow, changed once again my life. So in love and so young, both of us, we got married after only six months after having met each other, and so I postponed my license exams, my hole professional life, since our son said "Here I am". One year after his birth, I started to work for a Romanian television program, a job that I got after passing an exam, since the production house was searching for new employees. It was my first job, the place that I remember with tenderness. Years passed by, so did my husband's life, and what he didn't dare or didn't want to do, I decided to do on my own: leaving Romania and going to live with my kids to a place for which I longed, Madrid. Seven years after arriving in Madrid, I have worked as whatever I could (house cleaning, restaurant kitchens, writing one book and preparing the second, lately making my own political analysis website, raise my kids -one of them is studying English language and literature at the university), and here we are, still.