Description
Lyrical, surreal, and yet unsettlingly realistic, The Sinistra Zone swims in the totalitarian backwaters of Eastern Europe
Entering a weird, remote hamlet, Andrei calls himself “a simple wayfarer,” but he is in fact highly compromised: he has no identity papers. Taken under the wing of the military zone’s commander, Andrei is first assigned to guard the blueberries that supply a nearby bear reserve. He is surrounded by human wrecks, supernatural umbrellas, birds carrying plagues, albino twins.
The bears — and an affair with a married woman — occupy Andrei until his protector is replaced by a new female commander, “a slender creature, quiet,diaphanous, like a dragonfly,” and yet an iron-fisted harridan. As things grow ever more alarming, Andrei becomes a “corpse watchman,” standing guard over the dead to check for any signs of life, and then …
Reviews
"If there’s a magic realism Eastern-bloc style, The Sinistra Zone is surely its paradigm." — Alison McCulloch, The New York Times Book Review
"A fascinating novel that links intense realism with a boundless imagination, as if it could have written by Gabriel García Márquez." — Die Zeit
"The Sinistra Zone begins à la Chandler. But that's not how it continues. Like all good things, it embodies a wealth of possibilities: it can be read as a sociological intelligence briefing; a political/cultural situation report; a supplication; a finely wrought, postmodern feat of literary virtuosity; a chronicle of a bygone world, and so on. Again and again I was amazed by the fullness of the words, by the compact and luminous text — by the rich and powerful fabric that Ádám Bodor has woven into these pages." — Péter Esterházy
"It is hard to find in contemporary European literature a satire more dark and brutal and yet at the same time, more lyrical than this book." — El País
"The Sinistra Zone is a small masterpiece of stunning beauty that begs to be savored slowly." — La Vanguardia
