Lucian Dan Teodorovici’s novel Circul nostru vă prezintă / Our Circus Presents does a powerful take on the well-known theme of the world as circus. There is no bearded lady in this singularly original production, though, no strong man or clowns with comically (or oddly) smeared faces. We fall in with a group of professional illusionists, instead, whose material is life and who nourish themselves on a common illusion: that if not today, then tomorrow they will surely commit suicide, either by throwing themselves out a window or by tying themselves to a railroad track. If you give them a good shake, the ribbons with which they want to catch their audience will fall from their sleeves together with the playing cards with which they seek to inveigle both us and themselves. Here, the author is the main illusionist, and the theme is the absurdity of our common existence.
Circul nostru vă prezintă / Our Circus Presents is in its second edition at Polirom (2007). Polirom has also published Teodorovici’s Cu puţin timp înaintea coborîrii extratereştrilor printre noi / Shortly Before the Extraterrestrials Descended Among Us, now in a second revised edition (
