Romanian Literature Series – serie

Pushed around by ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languages, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.

The year is 1959, one of the darkest periods of Romania’s communist regime. Political prisoner Bruno Matei, a puppeteer of Italian ancestry, has been released from jail a broken man, suffering from amnesia. An uneasy relationship forms between `Matei Brunul’ and Bojin, the secret policeman who keeps him under constant surveillance. Gradually, the secret police will try to remould Matei’s mind by rewriting his past, turning the puppeteer into a puppet of the new totalitarian order. In parallel, a harrowing second narrative reveals Matei’s prison experiences: the story of an innocent man physically and mentally crushed by the totalitarian system, which explodes the manipulative fictions of the secret police one by one. Matei Brunul was the first Romanian novel to explore the carceral world of the former regime, but it is also a subtle meditation on Heinrich von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre and the ways in which a totalitarian state and ultimately fiction itself create and manipulate puppets.

La Belle Roumaine tells the story of Ana, a beautiful and bewitching Romanian woman. Shuttling between the capital cities of Europe. The novel follows Ana as she seduces café owners, philosophers, and wandering emigrants alike, each receiving a different version of her life story. To some, she’s a former nurse, to others, a former spy. To some she’s French and to others, Romanian. As each new layer of fabrication is added, the mystery of Ana and of what she’s running from grow apace.