Some of her novels are: Fantoma din moară[ro][2][3] 2008, Zogru[ro], 2006, and Lizoanca la 11 ani, 2009.[4][5][6] Her best-known novel in the English-speaking world is The Book of Perilous Dishes.[7]
Ruști was born in Comoșteni, Dolj County. She was brought up in a village in the south of Romania by her parents and teachers, struggling to survive in a communist world.
Her blood accommodates ancestry ranging from Montenegrin to Jews and especially DanubianRomanians, all with long names ending in -escu, most of them teachers, store keepers, and horse dealers. Her childhood home in Comoșteni preserved the experiences of a Balkan world, collected throughout hundreds of years.
Ruști's youth was spent in a house which had saved the traces of a past rich in events, carriages, coffers, and period clothes, crowned by plenty of books and objects which incited her imagination. But this world had brutally come to an end. When she was eleven, her father was murdered under mysterious circumstances, which have not been elucidated even to this day. The insecurity, oppression, absurd rules and chaos installed at the end of communism blended with the fantastic universe of a village governed by ghost tales, hierophanies, and underground forces, and this dramatic and magical setting inspired the novel Fantoma din moară (The Ghost in the Mill).[8] For this novel, she was awarded the Prize of the Writers' Union of Romania.[9]
A representative contemporary writer, Ruști has a wide variety of topics covered in her novels with a systematic construction. Some of her books were translated into international languages.[10]
Her novel Lizoanca la 11 ani, 2009, 2017 was awarded the Ion Creangă Prize of the Romanian Academy.[11] It was remarked as "one of the most powerful contemporary Romanian novels",[12] from the point of view of its themes and typology construction (according to Paul Cernat, Gelu Ionescu,[13] în vol. Târziu de departe, Ed Cartea Românească, 2012, pp. 112 si urm. Gelu Ionescu is the exeget of Eugen Ionesco.
On its publication, Lizoanca caused debates, as it brought to the public's attention the story of a child almost unanimously accused of the atrocities committed by the accusers.[14] Translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, and Serbian, the novel had reviews and kindled debates on taboo themes, such as pedophilia, domestic abuse, the issue of children with incompetent parents[15][16] (Marina Freier and Magyar Nemzet). For that matter, the topic of family decay as an institution is recurrent in all the novels written by Doina Ruști.[17]
Her bestseller Manuscrisul fanariot[ro] (The Phanariot Manuscript), 2015, 2016, 2017), which novelizes a18th-century's love story, was followed by Mâța Vinerii (The Book of Perilous Dishes, 2017),[7] a tale about sorcerers and magical culinary recipes, translated into English, German, Spanish, and Hungarian.[18] These two books give a perspective on a quite controversial historical period: the 18th Phanariot century. The stodgy style, the poetic overlay and the narrative fluidity were hallmarks of these two books. She is also the author of the novel Omulețul roșu (The Little Red Man, 2004, 2012), which was awarded the prize of the magazine Convorbiri Literare, and the multi-awarded Zogru (2006, 2015), a meta-novel translated into Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Spanish.
Ruști brings a specific vision into literature, exhibited throughout all strata of her work, but especially from a linguistic point of view. The creativity of expression lends the marker of her writing.[19][20]
She also wrote a number of short stories, published in periodicals and anthologies.
Taking an interest in both the fantastic and realist genres, Doina Ruști succeeds in writing as persuasively about the atrocities of the contemporary world and high ideals. Her novels often feature rapists, murderers, people who are starving, become corrupt or consumed by trivial commitments, reminding us of William Faulkner's characters – writer who has always inspired her. Ruști also brings to life fantastic characters, elves, sprites, ghosts, magical cats and sorcerers, which prompted some critics to compare her work with Marc Chagall,[21] with Mikhail Bulgakov's,[22]Süskind's and Márquez's[23][15] (according to Dan C. Mihăilescu,[24][25] Marco Dotti[26] and Neue Zürcher Zeitung[8]). The diversified themes that are strongly related to the present, as well as the ability of Doina Rusti of switching between registers, place her among the writers of contemporary Romanian literature (according to Nicolae Breban, Norman Manea,[27][28] Daniel Cristea-Enache[29]).
Dicționar de simboluri din opera lui Mircea Eliade (frag.) în La Jornada Semanal, nr. 455, 456, Mexico City, 2003 (trans: José Antonio Hernández García)
Lizoanca (trans Jan Cornelius), Horlemann Verlag, Berlin
The Romanian Academy's Ion Creangă Prize for the novel "Lizoanca at the Age of Eleven", 2009[38]
Dan C. Mihăilescu - Femeie cu omuleț, în vol.I Literatura română în postceaușism, II. Prezentul ca dezumanizare, Ed. Polirom, 2006, p.248
Dan C. Mihăilescu - Literatura româneasca în postceausism. II. Proza. Prezentul ca dezumanizare, cap. Realismul apocaliptic și deriziunea, Ed. Polirom, 2006, p.251
Geo Vasile - Elixirul narațiunii, in Romanul sau viața. Prozatori europeni, Ed. Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2007, p.343 și urm.
Gelu Ionescu - Târziu de departe, Ed. Cartea Românească, 2012, pp.112 si urm
Tania Radu - Jocuri riscante, in Chenzine literare, Humanitas, 2014
Andrei Simuț - Romanul românesc postcomunist între trauma totalitară și criza prezentului. Tipologii, periodizări, contextualizări, chapter III.3. Panoramări ficționalizante ale trecutului comunist: Un singur cer deasupra lor, Fantoma din moară, Pupa russa, Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2015
Călin Teutișan - cap Fantasticul levantin, în Enciclopedia imaginariilor din România. Vol. I: Imaginar literar, coord. Corin Braga, Polirom, 2020.
Raluca Andreescu, in Studies in Gothic Fiction, Zittaw Press, 2011
Abina Puskás-Bajkó -Maiorca or on the gypsy magic realism of seduction in Doina Ruști’s Manuscrisul fanariot, în Journal of Romanian Literary Studies, no. 6/2021, p.546.
Christene d’Anca - Mediating a loss of history in Doina Rusti’s The Ghost in the Mill by Journal of European Studies, vol. 48, 3-4: pp.265–277. , First Published October 22, 2018.
Dana Sala - Alessandro Baricco's Seta (Silk) and Doina Ruști's Manuscrisul fanariot (The Phanariot Manuscript), in Weaving a Narrative from Metamorphoses, 2015 ALLRO, Volume 22, Article code 487-121
Alina Bako - Images of Alterity in the Contemporary Feminine Prose, Speculum, 2017
Bianca Burța Cernat, Ficțiune și magie în Bucureștiul fanariot, Observator Cultural, nr. 863, 2017
