Appalling and tragic, Ognjen Spahic's exceptional short novel
animates the misery of Ceasescu's Romania and its inglorious fall
with a metaphor fully up to the task: leprosy. Gerhard Henrik
Armauer Hansen was a Norwegian scientist who isolated the
Mycobacterium leprae in 1873 and his 'children' are the tragic
sufferers of this ghastly disease. In Spahic's novel, it's 1989 and
a dozen of them are confined to the last leper house in Europe, an
under-equipped facility located in a miserable corner of South
Eastern Romania overlooking a toxic fertilizer factory. Here our
nameless narrator shares a room with fellow-sufferer Robert W.
Duncan, an American intelligence officer whose career was ruined
after he was captured by Communists in Berlin. But Duncan still has
a few contacts in the shadowlands, notably 'Mr Smooth' who has it
in his power to liberate the two men by supplying passports and
helping them out of the country. Blending Romania's turbulent 1989
revolution with a lyrical fiction that both shocks and enthrals,
Montenegrin author Ognjen Spahic offers an allegorical page to
Southeastern Europe's intriguing scrapbook. In 'Hansen's Children',
the downfall of Nicolae Ceausescu's repressive control is witnessed
from behind the walls of Europe's sole leper-colony. Powerless
against forces beyond the leprosarium, the rebellious political
change seen across the country influences and erodes the camp's
brittle harmony.
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