A félszárnyú
The Man with One Wing

Summary/Abstract: Matei Vișniec’s The Man with One Wing (Omul cu o singură aripă) is published in Éva Patkó’s excellent translation. Vișniec’s text can be interpreted as a fragmentary story of the revealing of a secret, where naturally – in keeping with the traditions of absurd drama – not only is the secret postulated as impossible to reveal, but at the same time the question arises whether it has any rational content worth decoding and understanding. Vișniec’s drama is constructed around one strong image that is not far from the metaphoric thinking of absurd theatre, but is at the same time, similarly to the author’s other texts, essentially linked to the deconstruction of metaphoric thinking: different interpretations and desires of the characters are cast on the half-human, half-animal, half-godlike creature only to be discarded later. Thus, the man with one wing, whose life is recreated for us in an apocryphal-story with a profane and bitter humour along a fragmented investigation or remembering, confronts the reader with the inexplicability of human life as a mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

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