The Realm of Sasha Kozak – Linwood Messina

Information

Author:

Iulian Ciocan

Date:

2011

Author:

Additional Info

THE REALM OF SASHA KOZAK

Rights Holder: Belleville Éditions
Original Language: Romanian
(French translation available)

"With devastating humor…Ciocan takes us onto the ‘dirty sidewalks of Chișinău where something is not quite right with the world’… A highly original telling of the ‘unending Moldavian transition following the collapse of the Soviet Union’"
—Le Monde des livres

On the dirty sidewalks of Chișinău, something is not quite right with the world. Octavian Condurache can’t do anything. He can’t write the novel of his life nor make the woman he married happy.

And the mother Frosea? She loves telenovelas so much that she nearly forgets that they are not real life. It must be said that the South American landscapes is more dream-like than the gloominess of her existence as a babushka.

There also Oleg Olegovici Liubn ! A Russian widower living with a Romanian widow.

In the realm of Sasha Kozak…we’ve truly seen it all!

Sasha and his group reign the streets of the dreary and cold capital, the scene of altercations between Russian-speaking and Romanian-speaking supporters. They somehow manage to live through the 90s while the divided country sinks into chaos after its independence.

Iulian Ciocan was born on 6 April 1968 in Kishinev, in the then Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia. He is a prose writer, journalist and literary critic. His novel Before Brezhnev Died was published by Polirom in 2007, and has been translated into Czech (Dybbuk, Prague, 2009). A chapter from his second novel was included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2011, edited by Aleksandar Hemon (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011). He has worked as a radio commentator for Free Europe in Chisinau since 1998. His prose has been published in literary magazines in the United States, Belgium, Germany and Brazil. He has also written two volumes of literary criticism and published eight volumes of journalism. He is a member of PEN Club, Republic of Moldova.

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