Excerpt from

Critics about

novel, "Ego Prose" series, Polirom Publishing House, 2007 (2nd edition), 376 pages, format 130 x 200 mm

Copyright: T.O.Bobe

Translation rights sold to: All rights are available

Book presentation

The novel is written from the perspective of a 10-year old boy and represents the composition he has to write as an assignment for the beginning of the new school year. As he is competing with his colleague Miruna, whose compositions are longer and more extravagant than his, Luca starts writing his assignment at the end of June, minutiously writing about all the events that he is a part of, all along the summer.

The holidays start in a common, boring atmosphere, but shortly after things take a spectacular turn, when Luca finds his grandmother dead. From this point on, reality and phantasy start mixing in the child’s composition until it would be impossible to say what actually happens and what is just the product of Luca’s imagination. One of the workers hired to fix the rooftop of the house kidnaps the boy, the other kills the first and then chops him off to pieces, Kitty, his cousin, who takes care of him while his parents are at work, dies too, falling into a hot-tar barrel. After he leaves for the seaside, Luca is permanently pursued and threatened by pirates and terrorists. He takes refuge at night in a graveyard and is eventually found by his parents, who are having endless conjugal fights. These culminate with their breaking-up right after their return from vacation, when the “persecutions” from his mother and father add to the menaces he continues to be a subject to. Right before the beginning of the new school year, the pressure upon the child increases with the invasion of the aliens, which Luca chases off, saving the world.

Depending on the focus point the reader chooses, the novel displays several layers. The first is that unfolding the universe of childhood, in all the innocence and cruelty specific to the age. But this universe is just a mirror reflecting, in all its absurd and grotesque, today’s Romanian society, still in its childhood, and “suffering” to the same extent as Luca from innocence and cruelty. Yet the social satire is rather a satire addressed to the media, the main tutor of the Romanian society, just like Luca is tutored by the grown-ups of his family. The cliches of thought, behaviour and language of all the characters are deeply influenced by the TV shows, by commercials and the Hollywood movies. The novel can also be read as a psychologic, or rather as a psychiatric thriller. Because Luca, suffering from an accelerating schizo-paranoid syndrome, kills, either symbolically (in his composition), or in real life, all those who are standing in his way, preventing him from attaining his goal: that of writing the best composition and of capturing the attention of his colleague and competitor, Miruna.

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