The Sinistra Zone
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher 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 …
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Andrei, a wayfarer and "simple harvester of fruit," arrives in the Ukrainian border town of Dobrin in search of his runaway adopted son he becomes entangled in the bizarre social and political world of the isolated village. Dobrin borders the Sinistra military zone (a pun on "sinister" and the real breakaway territory of Transnistria) where Andrei's son supposedly lives, and Bodor captures the cold realities of this totalitarian state in which each resident fulfills an assigned duty and is subject to the zone commander's whims. The security of Andrei's tenure in the village is threatened when his benefactor, the kind Colonel Borcan, who allowed Andrei to stay without identity papers, dies and is replaced by the ruthless Izolda Mavrodin. She quickly forms a citizen police, "the grey ganders", to monitor locals' behavior and threatens to banish Andrei for whom she sees no purpose in the zone. While Bodor's writing is rich with descriptions of unique characters from a pair of albino twins to a jovial Turkish trucker unafraid of Mavrodin's threats the narrative lacks urgency and the myriad peculiar characters distract from Andrei's mission to find his son.
