Search results for ""author alistair ian blyth""
Dalkey Archive Press Card Catalogue
Alistair Ian Blyth’s Card Catalogue is a book about books. Set in Bucharest in the decade after the Revolution, it presents a series of dreamlike narratives loosely linked by the subject of libraries: book hoarding, book hunting, book burning, and, above all, the dreams of infinite other books—past and future—that every individual codex volume inspires. Whether he is describing his encounters with Gribski (whose strange hidden library in Bucharest he is to see but once) or itemizing the various books whose existence he has dreamed (including “a collection of children’s paeans to Ceausescu bound in the same volume as a slim commentary on Pound’s Canto XIV”), Blyth shows himself to be a card catalogue unto himself. In the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Alberto Manguel, this book is bound to please.
£10.99
Dalkey Archive Press I'm an Old Commie!
Emilia, a pensioner in northern Romania, is forced to confront the nostalgic illusions she nurtures as a reaction to the grim post-communist present when her daughter, now living in Canada, telephones urging her not to vote for the former communists in upcoming elections. Determined to discover in her own mind why `things were better back then,’ she explores her memories of growing up in an impoverished village and of her life as a factory worker in the town. But ironic tension grows as the reader glimpses between the lines how nothing was what it seemed in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Interspersed among Emilia’s memories are fantastical, hilarious anecdotes about the dictator, told by a factory foreman who will turn out to have been a secret police informer. I’m an Old Commie! is a subtle and humane novel about self-deception, but also about the ways in which a totalitarian state twisted ordinary lives.
£11.99
Twisted Spoon Press Miruna: A Tale
£10.04
Istros Books Life Begins on Friday
A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. The stories of the various characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. The novel covers the last 13 days of 1897 and culminates in a beautiful tableau of the future as imagined by the different characters. We might, in fact, say that it is we who inhabit their future. And so too does Dan Cretu, alias Dan Kretzu, the present-day journalist hurled back in time by some mysterious process for just long enough to allow us a wonderful glimpse into a remote, almost forgotten world, but one still very much alive in our hearts.
£12.99
Dalkey Archive Press Before Brezhnev Died
The time is the twilight of the decrepit Brezhnev regime, the place, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia: the “Latin periphery of empire.” A pensioner seeks justice for his dead wife, crushed by a falling crane--the very symbol of the “construction of socialism”--but comes up against hostility from a cynical system at best indifferent, at worst contemptuous of human life. With a keen, Gogolian eye for the grotesque, often squalid, details of everyday life in the USSR, Iulian Ciocan paints darkly humorous but compassionate portraits of Homo sovieticus, from crusty war veterans and lowly collective farm workers to venal Party bigwigs, as each comes to the disturbing realization that the lofty ideals of Soviet society were lies all along. And for idealistic young pioneer Iulian, the biggest disillusionment of all will be the abrupt revelation of Brezhnev’s mortality.
£12.99
Dalkey Archive Press The Encounter
Pushed around by ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languages, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.
£12.99
Dalkey Archive Press La Belle Roumaine
La Belle Roumaine tells the story of Ana, a beautiful and bewitching Romanian woman. Shuttling between the capital cities of Europe. The novel follows Ana as she seduces café owners, philosophers, and wandering emigrants alike, each receiving a different version of her life story. To some, she’s a former nurse, to others, a former spy. To some she’s French and to others, Romanian. As each new layer of fabrication is added, the mystery of Ana and of what she’s running from grow apace.
£11.99
Dalkey Archive Press Short Prose: Dumitru Tsepeneag
In the late-1960s Romania, during the relative cultural thaw of the post-Stalinist period, Dumitru Tsepeneag emerged as an innovative writer of short prose and the pioneer of oneirism, a subversive theory and practice of literature that challenged not only socialist realism in particular but realism in general.By the early 1970s, following a cultural crackdown by the totalitarian state, oneirism had been banned and Tsepeneag was forced into exile in France. Short Prose, Volume 1, collects the three volumes of short stories that Tsepeneag published in Romania before going into exile: Exercises (1966), Cold (1967), and Waiting (1971), along with previously unpublished shorter texts from the same period.
£12.99
Dalkey Archive Press The Bulgarian Truck
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.
£10.99
Dalkey Archive Press Living Tissue, 10x10
With each chapter embodying a separate Commandment, Living Tissue, 10x10 is both a Decalogue and a ribald, exuberant, deliriously inventive postmodern Decameron, which covers four decades in the life of the protagonist, unfolding against the backdrop of Soviet and post-communist Moldova, from the untimely death of Yuri Gagarin in 1968 to the so-called “twitter revolution” of 2009. Tens of tragical, comical, fantastical, historical tales intertwine, punctuated by the endless upheavals suffered by twentieth-century Moldova. But the narrative also takes euphoric flight, in episodes that travel as far afield as Paris, Moscow, and Tibet. In Living Tissue. 10x10, Emilian Galaicu-Păun engages in literary origami, bending and blending together real and fictional worlds, abolishing up and down, here and there, past and present, as if in an Escher engraving, alternating narrative techniques, braiding myth, history and literary allusion, transgressing the boundaries of languages and cultures to create a rapturously intricate novel in ten dimensions.
£12.99
Dalkey Archive Press Matei Brunul
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 will try to remould Matei’s mind by rewriting his past, turning the puppeteer into a puppet of the new totalitarian order. In parallel, a harrowing second narrative reveals Matei’s prison experiences: the story of an innocent man physically and mentally crushed by the totalitarian system, which explodes the manipulative fictions of the secret police one by one. 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.
£15.99