Synopses & Reviews
The author-narrator, a sarcastic Romanian émigré with a French wife, tells with great insight and humor the story of a young student's life and education as he passes from post-Ceausescu Romania through an unwelcoming Western Europe beset with dangerous problems of its own. Sex-and drug-traffickers are only one part of the strange and paranoid world in which the student and his fellow-countrymen become entangled, while the author's past--in the form of post-communist gangsters--begins to catch up with him in his retreat in rural France...
Review
Tsepeneag creates a fantastical world from the remnants of a society as it flows into modern Europe. Readers interested in the human story beyond the factual history of the dissolution of communism and those interested in the creative process will enjoy this novel.With his metaphors and traps, Dumitru Tsepeneag reminds me of a magician who pulls flowers, animals, and strange objects out of his hat. He lays comical stories over a poignant, and often grim, background.[Tsepeneag] induces the sense that memory, time, and consciousness are both mutable and, ultimately, unknowable. -- Elizabeth Hand
Synopsis
Originally published in Romanian as Hotel Europa in 1996.
Synopsis
A novel begun by a man in his bathtub begins, little by little, to overflow into his life.
About the Author
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 In 1975, while he was in France, his citizenship was revoked by Ceauşescu, and he was forced into exile. In the 1980s, he started to write in French. He returned to his native language after the Ceauşescu regime ended, but continues to write in his adopted language as well.A translator from Romanian, Spanish, German, French, and Italian, Patrick Camiller has translated many works, including Dumitru Tsepeneag's Vain Art of the Fugue, The Necessary Marriage, and Hotel Europa.