By Lucian Dan Teodorovici
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
ISBN: 9781943150236
Description
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 try to remold Matei’s mind by rewriting his past. In parallel, a harrowing second narrative reveals Matei’s prison experiences.
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.
Reviews
“. . . exquisitely comic and movingly tragic by turns, while its shifting perspectives in time and narrative point of view keep the reader constantly involved in the story. It is a remarkable achievement by a writer who was born in 1975 and had no personal experience of the era it describes, bearing comparison with classics of the genre such as Milan Kundera’s The Joke.”
Biographical Information
Lucian Dan Teodorovici (b. 1975) is a novelist, author of short fiction, and screenwriter. His novel Our Circus Presents was published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press in 2009. Matei Brunul (2011) has earned widespread critical acclaim in Romania and won a number of major international awards.
Alistair Ian Blyth (b. 1970) has translated numerous works of fiction and philosophy from the Romanian, most recently the novels Short Prose and The Bulgarian Truck by Dumitru Tsepeneag as well as The Encounter by Gabriela Adamesteanu for Dalkey Archive Press.