Mircea Cărtărescu

The epic Theodoros is set in the nineteenth century and tells the story of the dizzying rise and fall of the son of two humble servants working for a Romanian aristocrat.

From an early age, Teodor dreams of becoming an emperor, of rivaling the Alexander whose heroic deeds his Greek mother sang to him. Obsessed with this fantasy, the boy works tirelessly to elevate himself, and once grown, he shrinks from nothing—no sin, no crime.

In the feverish letters he writes to his mother, we read how he crosses the Greek archipelago and the Levant with a band of violent pirates. He recounts his adventurous life and all the cruel and daring acts he undertakes in his quest for ultimate power and wealth. In the end, Tudor—Theodoros—seizes every opportunity that comes his way and becomes emperor, exactly as he had dreamed: the improbable Tewodros II, ruler of Ethiopia.

Mircea Cărtărescu was born in 1956 in Bucharest. He is the author of numerous novels and poetry collections. In Romania, Cărtărescu has won all the major literary prizes, including the State Prize for Blinding. Solenoid, unanimously hailed by the European press as a masterpiece, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Dublin Literary Award and was nominated for the International Booker Prize.