He had just turned forty. She had been gone for twenty years. Within the hour, his parents were dead.
Bucharest, the week of his fortieth birthday. Andrei Jebeleanu, editor-in-chief of the daily Momentul, investigative journalist, reluctant lecturer and connoisseur of every chemical shortcut out of consciousness, wakes from a binge to find a woman in the one apartment no woman has been allowed to enter.
She is Dia. Twenty years ago she was the love of his youth, a gothic oracle who could read his life back to him in four minutes. She designed the tattoo that covers his back, then vanished without a word. Now she has come back blonde, unmarked and changed, and he cannot decide which he resents more, her absence or her return.
Before he can find out, a telephone call tells him that his parents are dead. Their car left a mountain road between Predeal and Timișu de Sus at a speed his meticulous father would never have driven. A car with Moldovan plates begins to follow him through the city. And the man he turns to is his employer, Van D.: media baron, collector of the fragments of Bucharest's demolished churches, and a man whose past no archive has ever quite managed to settle.
The Apophatic Man is a novel about the selves we borrow and the truths we are spared. It is about a grief that refuses its rituals, a love measured in proportions, and a country still negotiating with its own records. Its voice is by turns erudite, profane and bereaved, and it moves between the Bucharest of the late 1990s and the present, between a lecture hall and a morgue, between poetry and the paperwork of power.
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