From Library Journal
A member of the Romanian literary establishment, Naum has penned an existentialist antinovel that has no clear plot, little development of characters (in fact, sometimes it's difficult to tell if the characters even exist), and no anchors to time. The reader is tipped off by the quote at the beginning of the novel: "And all of us who were alive thought we were dead and walked about in a daze...." The protagonist wanders through life with his (imaginary) companion Zenobia on a loose journey in a neutral frame of mind with little reaction to the people, events, and places he sees and the desires, temptations, and horrors that surround him. Experiments with style and vocabulary abound, and Zenobia benefits from a lush translation that lets the reader enjoy the language fully. For collections of avant-garde fiction.?Olivia Opello, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
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