By Dumitru Tsepeneag
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
ISBN: 9781564786982
Description
The writer-narrator of The Bulgarian Truck has hit upon a new technique for writing a novel, which he calls “a building site beneath the open sky,” but he cannot persuade his more widely read wife, Marianne, a character from an earlier novel, that it is any good. Meanwhile, the narrator’s extramarital affair with Milena, a young Slovak novelist who writes in French, turns sour. Interspersed among the narrator’s accounts of his novel’s growing pains are stories of the characters he has invented—Tsvetan, a Bulgarian truck driver, and Beatrice, an impenetrable French erotic dancer—unfolding according to their own logic while hurtling toward a fatal conclusion.
Biographical Information
Dumitru Tsepeneag is one of the most innovative Romanian writers of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1975, while he was in France, his citizenship was revoked by Ceaucescu, and he was forced into exile. In the 1980s, he started to write in French. He returned to his native language after the Ceaucescu regime ended, but continues to write in his adopted language as well. He lives in France.
Alistair Ian Blyth is the translator of many works by Romanian authors, including Teodorovici’s Our Circus Presents, Lungu’s I’m An Old Commie!, and several novels by Tsepeneag, all of which are available from Dalkey Archive Press. He lives in Bucharest, Romania.