Teo de la 16 la 18
Teo from 4 to 6
Fiction
Raluca Nagy
Romania | 2021
After a difficult childhood, with several medical problems, Teo begins to understand that she is different. She goes to university in the capital city of her country, then studies abroad in two locations, one of them decided by the “Bologna fairy”. During her Masters she starts working for an agency and never stops travelling to other cities she assigns her own names, giving the reader a constant feeling of a recreated contemporary Babel. With each experience, things accelerate and get out of hand, personally and professionally: love, abuse, marriage, surviving a near-death experience, reinventing herself afterwards. The first theme of the book is reflected directly in the title – an accolade to Agnes Varda’s film “Cléo de 5 à 7”: a cancer diagnosis that changes everything. From this perspective, the book reveals the complete experience of a young woman surviving an aggressive form of cervical cancer. The reader discovers that 16 and 18 are references to HPV, the virus that causes this disease still so invisible in many countries, killing hundreds of thousands every year. A second theme, in close relation to the medical one, is spiritual: the novel is a feminist reinterpretation of the Bible, as Teo’s and Jesus’s lives are very similar. All the apostles appear in the book, as characters, with their real names in various languages, dependent on the circumstances in which Teo meets them.A third theme of this book could be language itself, as the author throws in many different fonts, languages, styles (including the parody of an academic text), word-plays and humour, challenging the conventional form of a novel and making the text feel very contemporary. All in all, a bold, complex, intense and visionary novel.
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