Alina Nelega

The novel explores the collective and individual prejudices that give birth to autocracy. The narrator, a writer and journalist born in the 1990s and based in a Transylvanian city, finds her grandfather's memoirs, written by a Romanian army officer indoctrinated by communism and nationalism, an old soldier that never fought a war but was convinced that enemies were everywhere. But how reliable are her grandfather's memoirs? This question triggers the narrator's search for the "truth" in the history of Romanian-Hungarian relationships, in the larger context of Central and Eastern Europe, while, on another plan, in the present, as a woman, she is facing social preconceptions and humiliation, being forced to quit her job as a journalist. Practising freedom as a personal responsibility, and not as "voluntary servitude" (in Étienne de La Boétie's terms), her choices are permanently challenged. Both she and her moody and solitary mother, an uncomfortable professor who encourages the free speech of her students and confronts with academic and political pressure, have their own fears and take on their own fights. But again, the same questions arise: who are the enemies and who are we fighting?