On 16 December 1989, in the Transylvanian city of Timisoara, an anti-dictatorship revolution was started by a Hungarian ethnic priest. This, just a few days later, has ended Ceausescu's communist regime in Romania.
The book is a memoir of a Transylvanian Hungarian minority child, who was growing up during that dictatorship and experienced the Kafka-esque society first hand. It is also a memoir of the years that followed the 1989 Revolution, including an ethnic pogrom organised in his hometown by the Romanian extreme right movement.
It is also an analysis of the post-revolution period, which swapped communism with democracy, religion with greed, external threats with internal tensions, absolute power with surreal levels of corruption, one dread with many fears.
The country is still struggling with the legacy of the totalian decades, with the regime's echoes, whereby former figures of the regime still occupy key positions in public and political life.
Having relocated to the United Kingdom after his University studies, Lehel had the opportunity to witness remarkably similar distortions of political messages during the so-called War on Terror. It operated with rhetoric that was eerily familiar in its cult of paranoia and excesses in ensuring a "safe society". Once again, external and internal threats were used, in a very different socio-political context, to motivate measures that were deemed illegal even by the European Court of Human Rights.
Witnessing this in the British society was an unexpected and strange deja-vu.
The book therefore also includes an analysis of these political shifts, and draws parallels between certain strategies of a past regime in a very different country during the Cold War, and the tactics used for the more recent War on Terror.
