Pigeon Post

A man, a writer, lives alone in a rather squalid Paris apartment. He is trying to write a novel, but he has nothing to say. He tries multiple beginnings, interspersed with one digression (but from what?) after another. In the hope of finding subject matter for his would-be realistic story, he then sends letters to three friends - Edmond, Edgar, and Edourd - with a list of questions about their lives, some rather personal inquiries, some bordering on the obscene. The responses are not very helpful, and even seem suspiciously untrue. Out of this melange of stops and starts, false information, questionable memories, pieces of this and that, an insanely comic novel starts to emerge.
Dumitru Tsepeneag takes us into a game of memory and storytelling, where the tenderness of the past clashes with the comedy of the present, and where fictional characters and actual friends mingle in the play of the imagination.

Dumitru Tsepeneag is one of the most innovative Romanian writers of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960 and 70s, he and the poet Leonid Dimov led the country’s only literary movement in opposition to the official socialist realism. In 1975, while in France, his citizenship was revoked by Ceausescu, and he was forced into exile. In the 1980s, he started to write in French. He then returned to his native language after the Ceausescu regime ended, but continues to write in his adopted language as well.