Marius Daniel Popescu

Les Couleurs de l’hirondelle

«You are in front of the morgue of the town hospital, your cousin and your uncle are with you, you are standing and talk­ing about the woman whose body you have come to take away.»

Eidgenössische Literaturpreise 2012

The path leads from the morgue to the church, and it is long. The narrator of 'Les Couleurs de l'hirondelle' has returned to faraway Romania because his mother has died. Now she is to be buried, but first there are a number of bureaucratic hurdles. The route to the church, where the funeral is to take place, is transformed into a complex, winding path through the narrator's life so far. We hear not only about his newly-deceased mother and his childhood in this (unnamed) country, but also about his daughter. She is eleven years old, born in Lausanne, in the narrator's new homeland, and so the place she calls home is completely different from the one he grew up in. She is entering the unknown world of puberty and beginning to cast a critical eye on her father.
Popescu's novel displays a great polyphony of language and form. In his hands, the relatively short route through the town becomes a broad and diverse narrative journey through time. He describes a world of great colour and variety but also of broken fragments. The early years in Romania under Ceauşescu's dictatorship; a country whose messianic drive into the future actually forced it backwards; and the present as the author writes this book: all this is conjured up here, not in chronological order but in a brilliant rush of storytelling.

(Martin Zingg / Pro Helvetia)

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: The Swallow's Colours

Corti, Paris 2012

ISBN: 978-2-7143-1072-9