Princess Angina

A rebel child who refused to take life seriously. He dreamed of being God, but became a writer, an artist, a screenwriter, a playwright, an actor—who knows what else, too—always remaining himself. Multiform and elusive, Roland Topor—the dreamer-writer, the other, not by his own choice, but due to circumstances, at the will of a cannibalistic history that has no concern for the human being. All his life he will be rewriting the story—private and collective. All his life Topor will be weaving his own myth out of fragments of dreams and nauseating reality, creating a delicate, weightless tapestry with puzzling and bizarre patterns.

"The Princess Angina" is a fairy tale in which there is not a hint of either tenderness or a moral. After all, both are terribly boring. Only absurdity, only the chimeras of imagination threatening to leap off the pages.

Read it if you dare. But if you understand nothing, don’t blame the author. It’s not his job to interpret dreams—his job is to capture them.

The audiobook was narrated by theater actor Pavel Yakovlev, from the Petr Fomenko Workshop.

5 reasons to buy the book "The Princess Angina":
1) Again in Russian, a text by the outstanding French artist, surrealist writer, and screenwriter Roland Topor;
2) In a 1974 television interview, Topor said that in his works there is no particular message—or, more precisely, no single clear message. “I don’t create fables, I create fairy tales. There is no moral in them. I think that having only one moral is indecent. One moral isn’t enough. I’m interested in ambiguity. A crossroads that lets you choose which path to follow;
3) “Topor, like his heroes, did not acquire otherness—it was forced upon him by force. In the empty routine of postwar Paris, he saw only a fragile neutrality, hiding a deeply rooted animal essence of man.” — Andrew Hodgson;
4) In 1981, Topor was awarded the Grand Prix of the National Society of Graphic Arts by the Ministry of Culture of France;
5) Thanks to his activity in many different areas of art, Roland Topor still remains in the spotlight of many contemporary artists. Among his famous admirers are the composer György Ligeti (known from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and film director Guillermo del Toro (known from the film “Pan’s Labyrinth”).