Published books:
Ecografie (ARC Publishing House, 2024, )
Romanian only
“In this isolated land, transformed into a separatist enclave, there are dramas that keep “smouldering” over several generations. This is a legacy of a repressed identity that is still felt by the locals as a terror of history. The protagonists of this novel by Alexandru Popescu “Ecografie”, the aggressor, on the one hand, and the victim, on the other, are brought on the same stage, to face each other. It is love and the need to live next to a stronger half that bring these two together. The narrative gives us the opportunity to follow the modulations of the consciousness of the characters caught in the webs of love and hate, of death and life, in the convulsions of love and violence, of human suffering caused by identity fractures.”
Nadejda IVANOV, literary critic
Purchase the book in Moldova
Adâncuri incolore (ARC Publishing House, 2023, )
Romanian only
* nominated for the National Prose Prize “Ziarul de Iași” 2024 (Romania)
* selected for adaptation into a film script, along with 9 other literary texts, within the cinematographic dramaturgy laboratory “LitFilm” (2023), initiated by the Association of Independent Filmmakers from the Republic of Moldova “Alternative Cinema”.
Adâncuri incolore, Alexandru Popescu’s second novel is a vivisection on a lifeless body of the rural space. This is being performed in order to understand the dynamics of the migration from countryside towards the cities and civilisation, through specific life stories of the characters. The story tells that when an area is depopulated (be it by means of someone’s interference, of foreign occupation, of poverty etc.) something from its primal energy vanishes, something completely opposite to a dismounting (or settling) happens. Hence it leads to a series of mysterious happenings within that area where the normal mechanism of social interaction or the community tights disappear. In such a situation the human beings isolate themselves within their own problems and challenges, which leads to extreme situations. The book tells the story of these villagers that had played their part in crushing the harmony and order and thereby becoming advocates of evil. Tudor is a local policeman that chooses to keep the order within the village and his personal life by means of violence. The postman commits suicide after losing his only child. The boy had been swollen by the nearby lake’s dark silence. The lake itself is a character that kills without a trace many inocent lives. The postman’s wife shares the bitter fate of becoming insane.
The policeman’s only daughter renounces her promising career in law in favour of working in a beauty salon, even though that career had been laid by her father with many sacrifices and efforts. She is nevertheless firm to do this as a desperate try to put her life in order. At the very moment when she finally feels released from her father’s pressures the woman meets her end in the lake’s depths, together with a just married couple – the only hope of a fading village. Victor, Tudor’s brother had emigrated to The Netherlands long time ago. He appears to be the only character that looks rationally to this switch from an end of an era towards the birth of a new order.
Purchase the book in Moldova
Montana (ARC Publishing House, 2022)
Romanian only
*winner of the Writers’ Union of Moldova debut novel (2023)
Alexandru Popescu’s debut novel Montana, published before the outbreak of the Russian war in Ukraine, reflects the existential path of a Transnistrian child towards a free world, conditioned by the political reality of the region. The book is a direct lens fresco of social life in Transnistria between two worlds that give birth to particular destinies, bearing all the imprints of this experience and all the signs of damnation that the central character tried to overcome, rising above the void. The Russian-Soviet world that Ion Josan went through as a child, together with the war, poverty, a shattered identity, with poor access to education, decency, an anti-Romanian rhetoric, etc. and the European world that the latter embraces, already as a journalist in Great Britain, settles at a distance measured in traumas and defeats that perpetuate and become unbearable.
Presently he suffers from epilepsy which makes it almost impossible to function professionally and even as a normal human being. It becomes nearly impossible to live a decent and fulfilling life. It’s a book about the metamorphosis of normality, its mutilation, a book about the force of spirit on its way to salvation through values, memory and love. It’s also a book that won’t let us judge easily the political errors, the forced occupation of land and the nonsense of war through the life of a specific individual. This book was well received in Chisinau. It also drew the attention and sympathy from the of people of letters that belong to a space of literary and cultural tradition – Romania. Doina Ioanid writes in „Observator cultural”: „Montana is an eccellent debut novel, admirably led, without any excesses, without any stammerings. It is a captivating and profound novel. It took me only a few hours to read it. As a matter of fact, if it was’nt mentioned on the back cover that this is a debut novel, I could have sworn this book belongs to a well grown writer.” Iulian Ciocan, a famous Moldovan writer, notes about Alexandru Popescu’s book: „ … I think, and I’m not trying to exagerate here, that this is one of the most memorable debuts of the last decade in Moldovan literature. It is probably the most brilliant debut.” The literary critic Eugen Lungu also notes: „With Montana we’ve got probably the most seriosus and truthful prose about the Transnistrian enclave. In this retardant Mezozoic the time had frozen. It preserved through it’s frost the soviet social and political realities that we started to forget. (…) The novel seems to have been written by a hand with complete and utter epic dexterity. This is truly amazing, considering the author is only a beginner!”