The Back Cover
Praise for Little Fingers
Florian
painfully and minutely analyses a society disfigured by dictatorship.
He simultaneously tells a fantastic, poetic story full of characters
who are both out of the ordinary and completely unforgettable.
Narrating with a passion for language and storytelling….[the author
seeks]…human truth hidden behind lies, shame and suspicion. Florian
follows the unpredictable sequences of everyday life under communism
like a field researcher and discovers not only unscrupulousness but
also, unexpectedly, much tenderness behind the madness. (Frankfurter
Rundschau)
This
novel does not exhaust itself in suspicion. Its ideal is not the
disclosure of [real] truth concealed behind… half-truths, [but
rather] the liberation of literature from the burden of historical
proof.… This debut novel leaves the climes of current realism
resolutely behind and peoples a startled health resort in the
Carpathians with figures like the ones with which Bohumil Hrabal once
haunted socialist Prague: strange saints…, inept lovers, modern
wanderers descended from old fairytales and local legends—all of
whom drag anecdotes and fragments of their biographies in their wake
like trains, porous, faded, but still colorful. (Süddeutsche
Zeitung)
Little
Fingers is an exceptional first novel.
It marks the debut of an already sovereign writer. In this playful
text, the horrific has a way of turning into the grotesque. This is,
of course, a tale of repressed guilt and the general mistrust that
follows the end of dictatorship. The idea of comparing regimes from
different galaxies is fascinating. (Neue
Zürcher Zeitung)
Forensic
methods stand at the center of this novel whose narrative structure
functions like a detective story that traces the course of lies
before and after the key year of 1989….
Paradoxically, and at the same time, Filip Florian scoffs at the
yearning for exposé with a burgeoning round of ever more fantastical
tales. (Deutschlandradio)
With
a punch line at the end of his book that I won’t
give away here, the author shows in the most cunning way that fiction
and lies can occasionally be truer than the – supposed – truth.
With this astonishing novel, rich in points of view and ideas, full
of imagination and humour… Florian… broadens the horizon of
Romanian literature. (Freitag)
In
this debut novel, a strange, pervading charm combines with
sensitivity to the aftermath of totalitarian oppression. (Der
Spiegel)
Praise for The Băiuţ Alley Lads
TheBăiuţ
AlleyLadsis
one of the best Romanian-language novels ever. It is written by two
hands in a series of sequences – chapters –in which the
narrators' alternating voices speak constantly to each other. Băiuţ
Alley Lads
is the literary equivalent of Bach’s Double
Violin Concerto
--Carmen
Muşat
I
feel reborn somehow seeing what the two authors find important: all
that moves and holds still—mothers, grandfathers, little brothers,
bicycles, teachers, and soccer by the minute, one Sunday after
another…
--Radu
Cosaşu
TheBăiuţ
Alley Ladsis
an extraordinary story told by two voices that communicate perfectly,
though with broad thrusts and elaborate contradictions…parallel
histories [enmeshed in] the love of a fabulous
family...
--Simona Sora
Filip
and Matei Florian write damn good fiction….Băiuţ
Alley Lads
is … a lucid plunge into the magic of the past, a fresh and
charming book on the everyday miracle of childhood…
--Paul
Cernat
Praise for Days of the King
Filip
Florian may have the most successful fictional imagination… of all
the writers to appear post ’89.
--Tania
Radu
[Filip
Florian] follows his characters with the passion of an ant breeder
observing his terrarium… a meticulous master of the art of literary
miniatures and exoticism
--Radu
Cosaşu
….an
apocryphal fiction on the lines of Julian Barnes’ A
History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,
breathing the utopian scent from Rushdie’s Haroun
and the Sea of Stories
---
--Alex Goldiş
[Filip
Florian] is one
of the two or three most important new writers of Romanian fiction.”
--Paul
Cernat
