Moldova’s Bleak Storyteller Strikes Chord With European Audience

"Moldova's biggest problem, from my point of view, is corruption. I am also a journalist and a writer, and I set an infrared eye on this reality. From my point of view, here, everybody steals," Ciocan says forthrightly, in an interview for BIRN.

The features of Moldovan society described by the author's dark novels are, to a large extent, common in all Eastern European countries, crushed by the endemic corruption of the former Socialist Eastern bloc.

Moldova also bears the imprint of the Soviet corruption that still grinds down the country.

"I don't know if somewhere else as much was stolen as in Moldova. Giving and taking bribes here are a kind of modus vivendi," the author muses.

In the book, as the days go by, the small crevice in front of Polobok's mansion grows bigger and bigger, until it threatens to swallow the whole of Chisinau.

The solution comes mystically, and Polobok begins to seek redemption.

The secondary characters who spin around this moving cataclysm are meanwhile drawn from the writer's observation of daily life of Chisinau.

"It is risky to say that these are real characters. It's much easier for me to build fictional characters based on real people," he says.

Iulian Ciocan`s books translated in several languages so far. Photo: Iulian Ciocan`s personal archive

"For example, a mayor. And then I make a fictional mayor, starting from some character traits or something related to the personality of that man in real life," the writer explains.

Since publishing his debut novel Before Brezhnev Died, in 2007, Ciocan has written three more. Now, he is working on his fifth.

His second, The Land of Sasha Kozak, has already been translated into French and Czech by Belleville...