"Grigorcea’s distinctive writing style is rich and textured [...]. A thoroughly enjoyable read: delightfully literary and thoughtful, and full of fascinating details about Romanian culture [...]." - New Books in German
"The author's youth in a country shaken by world history makes the novel memorable beyond its literary qualities." - Der Bund - Sonntagszeitung
“Her writing is like painting with a thick brush – daring, gleeful, lavish and humorous.” - Anne-Catherine Simon, Die Presse
Eerie, profound, archaic – a breathtakingly atmospheric image of post-Communist Romania
Present-day Transylvania. After studying art in Paris, a young Bucharest artist returns to her home in the Romanian Carpathians – the small town of B., where she had spent every summer vacation during her childhood and teenage years with her great aunt among chandeliers and Persian carpets. Today, B. has outlived its glory days. Too many have left for good after the revolution to seek their fortune in Western Europe. The artist returns to an estranged world, one to which she is solely linked to through a few close friends and the strings that tie up her family history.
When a defiled body is found upon the grave of Vlad the Impaler, better known as Dracula, she realises that the past still holds B. tightly in its grip. She wants to tell the place’s story even though it eludes her. While, in the beginning, she is afraid of mixing up the chronological order of events, she eventually comes to realise that every order makes sense. Because a story is not about causes and effects but about one thing only: Fate.
Dana Grigorcea paints a breathtakingly atmospheric image of a post-Communist society which still to this day appears to be caught in an intermediate realm. Without any warning at all, she leads her readers into the heart of a horror which can only be conjured by one’s own imagination – or by the exigent Count Dracula.
Sample translation available!