Bulgarian Truck: A Building Site Beneath the Open Sky (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781564786982)

The writer-narrator of The Bulgarian Truck has hit upon a new technique for constructing a novel, which he calls "a building site beneath the open sky," but he can't seem to persuade his more widely read wife, Marianne, a character from an earlier novel of his, that it's any good. She is in New York, receiving treatment for a mysterious condition hitherto unknown to medical science, and her sardonic advice, imparted over the telephone, only hinders the novel's progress. Meanwhile, the narrator's extra-marital affair with Milena, a young Slovak novelist who writes in French, is turning sour, not helped by the large age difference between them and the fact that her Parisian publisher is far more prestigious than his. The affair ends after an acrimonious exchange of e-mails, in which she is ultimately revealed to be nothing but a literary device. Interspersed among the hapless narrator's accounts of his novel's growing pains, the story of the characters he has invented--Tsvetan, a Bulgarian truck driver, and Beatrice, an impenetrable French erotic dancer haunted by a childhood obsession with hedgehogs--unfolds according to its own oneiric logic, before hurtling to a fatal conclusion.

Author: Dumitru Tsepeneag
ISBN-10: 1564786986
ISBN-13: 9781564786982
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Language: English
Published: 02/15/2016
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.60d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 11/15/2015