Royal Hunt

By Dumitru Radu Popescu

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0704300443
• ISBN13: 9780704300446
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Interlink Publishing+group Inc
• Length: 174 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.4" x 0.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

instinctive drives lead to a morbid contagion

The Royal Hunt by Romanian writer Dumitru Popescu, is a distinguished penetrating exploration of the psycholagy of mass terror, and evocatively illustrates the mythic projection of terror's dehumanizing effects on both individuals and entire communities. In a keleidoscopic reconstruction of a physician's memories of his traumatic childhood, the protagonist as a young boy discovers the wonders of sex, love and friendship amid a sinister backdrop of crime and terror that threaten to engulf the entire community to which he is a part. For reasons that remain obscure, Kalagherovich, a country-level official of the communist party, is targeted for extermination and is therefore accused, in the classic manner, of beiing the agent of a foreign power. He dissapears mysteriously and strange happenings occur in the lives of those involved in the plot, who manipulate events behind the scenes by exploiting what seems to be the sudden outbreak in the community of an epidemic of rabies. Inhuman violence erupts. Instinctive drives take over, as monstrous forms of desire are indulged. A panic comes to grip the entire community as we become aware that it is this same panic that is the only real disease they must contend with. A horrifying tale that brings the lush corruption of human desires that lurks within the forest of a world gone mad with its own rational thrust to force the future upon itself when its abscence seems to be most damning. The Romanian Dumitru Popescu was associated with the Communist Party of the 1970s and 80s, and because of it he has fallen to disrepute among the international community of letters. However this fable has the sharp interanal logic of an Jose Saramago tale, tarrying with instigating innuendos that allow for allusions to a state of anarchy a la Hobbes to be but the reverse impression of an Orwellian dystopian state, leading to a Lord of the Flies game that has matured and devolved. Here we have a writer of lofty literary merits, who suffers in reputation because of politics. Would that we realize there is much to learn from this treasure in our times of self-inflicted self-serving terror we might be the better for it. Lo and behold this title, expertly translated by J.E. Cottrell, would make a perfect Hollywood movie right about now. Aren't we fully engaged in a time of terror?