English Translation: In Times of Fading Light, translated by Anthea Bell, Minneapolis: Grey Wolf Press, 2013. Book review by UC Berkeley undergraduate Jennifer Lau Family dynamics, interestingly enough, rarely change across time. Society progresses and human beings adapt, but internal relations among those who share blood and genetics remain mostly the same. The literary fiction […]

English translation: Guilt, translated by Carol Janeway, New York: Knopf, 2012 Book review by UC Berkeley undergraduate Jennelle Mathews: Originally published in Germany in 2010, Ferdinand von Schirach’s Guilt is a collection of short stories centered on the dimensions of guilt present in human nature. Specifically, the short stories are based in modern Germany and involve […]

Book Review by UC Berkeley undergraduate Ann Huang: In her autobiography “So wie ich will: Mein Leben zwischen Moschee und Minirock”, published in 2010, Melda Abkas presents her experiences as a second-generation Turkish youth endeavouring to establish her own cultural identity in modern Germany. Written just after Abkas’s 19th birthday, in highly colloquial rhetoric, the […]

Jacob beschliesst zu lieben is Florescu’s latest novel. Following upon biographical escapes (which his first two novels embody), Florescu’s Jacob is an expressive family saga. Beyond being a mere testament for a future, this novel is foremost about the ambiguity of birth and origin. The novel opens in an epic way, in an immediate storm […]

In this text, Romania continues to be the storyworld of the spectacular and exotic but also a topos for identity crises. Zaira’s life starts on the countryside ranch where she lives with her mother. The two women have a difficult relationship and the young daughter takes refuge in her imaginary world. It is another spectacular […]

Turning towards the past, Catalin Dorian Florescu captures individual worlds, extraordinary and miraculous ones. Der blinde Masseur is the story of a blind man, who massages his patients while they read to whim out loud or record literary master pieces in exchange for their treatment. In the village, at the edge of the world, the […]

Der kurze Weg nach Hause is a Bildungsroman, as Florescu stated during a reading in the winter of 2012. The novel constructs a spectacular journey towards individuality for Florescu’s characters. Young and addicted to life and excess, Luca and Ovidiu, as protagonists, embark on a journey that takes them from Zürich back to a lost […]

Storytelling through the eyes of one’s childhood makes Florescus first novel Wunderzeit a success. His novel is a journey through the past of places and childhood memories: at the Yugoslavian border, the family’s flight from a communist Romania allows the protagonist, Alin, to remember his childhood, his travel with his father to the US for […]