The Back Cover
What interests me most in Corpuri de iluminat / Dark Bodies is the rare combination of astounding narrative force—capable of recreating life from the most unexpected details—with technical ingenuity and fineness of soul… the most important “detail” is the great love poem Stelian Tănase compounds with the help of a young couple secluded in a house on the edge of Bucharest...
—Florin Manolescu, Contrapunct
Stelian Tănase is one of the very few writers of his generation not tempted by species outside the novel. He is a novelist par excellence….The narrative writing is…coherent, objective, telegraphic, internalized, psychological, sideways…emphatic, parodic, joking …[and] the textual diversity…corresponds to a profound appreciation of human beings.
—Nicolae Manolescu, România Literară
Stelian Tănase’s Corpuri de iluminat /Dark Bodies is a remarkable novel. It’s well written…The author knows he writes well too, and he works out in all the prose styles of the decade. He does retro, episolatory and sentimental prose. He’s Flaubertian, Balzacian, Radu Peterescian (to put the matter on a Romanian plane). He analyzes and parodies. He cites and implicitly competes with other writers …Stelian Tănase writes luxuriously. He belongs to literature’s high society. There’s a luster over everything in his books: style, utterance, sometimes even the characters themselves: exceptional artists…but souls in search of a safe haven as well in a novel that nourishes itself on the luxury of melancholy—for this novelist, an essential phrase.
— Cornel Ungureanu, Orizont
