At the beginning of 2021, seventeen years after its first Romanian edition and nearly a decade after its initial Italian publication, Omulețul roșu (The Little Red Man) was reissued in Italy by Sandro Teti Editore (Rome), in a new edition translated by Roberto Merlo, professor at the University of Turin and a writer.
The Italian launch took place online on April 22, 2021, hosted by the publisher’s official channels. The event is particularly noteworthy, as re-editions of Romanian literary fiction abroad are rare, especially many years after the original publication.
“We decided to publish Doina Ruști’s The Little Red Man in Italy because I greatly enjoyed reading it in the excellent translation by Professor Roberto Merlo. This is the first reason. The second is my desire to promote contemporary Romanian literature in my country. Recently, we published a volume of short stories about the Ceaușescu period by seventeen Romanian writers. I am very happy to publish Doina Ruști’s novel. She is an extraordinary writer, with a fantastic sense of humor, and widely known in many countries.”
— Sandro Teti, Publisher
The first Italian edition (2012) received critical acclaim in major publications such as La Stampa, Il Venerdì di Repubblica, Il Libero, and Il Cittadino.
The 2021 reissue also generated numerous cultural events and public discussions in Italy.
Originally published in Romania in 2004 (Editura Vremea) and reissued in 2012 within a Mediafax project, The Little Red Man is currently in preparation for a new Romanian edition at Editura Litera.
Laura, the novel’s protagonist, embarks on an adventure through a virtual world that explores the corrupted terrain of digital dreaming. Enigmatic cities filled with secret passages and indecipherable messages, dizzying falls into darkness, supernatural quests and ethereal flights, monstrous and curious creatures, unsettling landscapes, an unborn child capable of miracles, a procession of animated shoes, dangerous paths, and a white house—these elements form a hallucinatory, convulsive, and absurd universe, at once coherent and deeply real. It is an electronic, bizarre, and unpredictable wonderland, into which Laura ventures with fascination and determination, like a telematic Alice.
Book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXejio2X5D4
