Angelus

From the Afterword by Marius Conkan:

Ruxandra Cesereanu's novel Angelus raises a series of questions regarding the society in which we live, offering, at the same time, possible solutions to (or at least, hypotheses on) the revitalisation of the sacred and the resurrection of symbolic depth for a (post)humanity characterised by the atrophy of imagination and the hypertrophy of pragmatic reason. Taking as her iconographic model Andrei Rublev's Holy Trinity and proposing a postmodern reply to Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, Ruxandra Cesereanu, in her parable-like novel, begins with the following question: what would happen if angels were to descend upon a Metropolis one day?

"Into the Metropolis and into the Zone fall three angels to challenge the authorities with their muteness and their incorruptible natures. Through this trio, Ruxandra Cesereanu turns a lens on dictators, the military-industrial complex and urban reality in general. Her weapons are truth and the kind of imagination that spawns garbage-collecting flamingoes, a reimagined paradise and Seraphic chocolate. Buoyant, comic and finally apocalyptic, Angelus reminds us that, as in The Master and Margarita, the supernatural is sometimes hard for us humans to bear."
—Lawrence Norfolk, author of Lemprière's Dictionary and The Pope's Rhinoceros

Ruxandra Cesereanu was born in Cluj, Romania, in August 17, 1963. Over the last two decades, she has established herself is an important Romanian poet and prose writer who has been awarded a number of literary honors. She is also Professor at the Faculty of Letters (Department of Comparative Literature) in Cluj, member of the staff of the Center for Imagination Studies (Phantasma) and director of the Creative Writing Workshops on poetry, prose and movie scripts.