Theodoros clicked the latches of the briefcase. They snapped open with a sound like a breaking bone. He withdrew a stack of papers, yellowed and brittle, covered in handwriting that Mircea recognized instantly. It was his own scrawl—the frantic, desperate penmanship of his youth.
Unlike conventional dictator novels (e.g., García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch ), Cărtărescu’s Theodoros is not a hyper-masculine monster but a frail, weeping, often bedridden child-man. His tyranny is not driven by ideology but by ontological nausea. He conquers territories because he cannot conquer his own nightmares. The novel suggests that all power is a form of parasitism: Theodoros feeds on the dreams of his subjects, just as he himself is fed upon by an endless host of maggots, worms, and internal voices. mircea cartarescu theodoros