Like Emmanuel, Max Blecher suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, and spent the last year of his life in a full body cast and wheelchair, before dying at age twenty-nine with two novels completed.
A Russian refugee, Anastasia Romanov bears an uncanny resemblance to the princess of the same name, who was rumoured to have survived the brutal murder of her family at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries.
Cartarescu brings together twenty short stories that he wrote for ELLE magazine. The protagonist of every story is female, but they are not individual portraits of women - it is a group portrait of womanhood.