Dintele sau osciorul (The Tooth or the Little Bone), Tracus Arte, 2025 – shortlisted for the Romanian National Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, ROMCON Craiova, 2026
https://edituratracusarte.ro/produs/dintele-sau-osciorul-pompilian-tofilescu/
https://carturesti.ro/carte/dintele-sau-osciorul-4698993947
https://www.libhumanitas.ro/dintele-sau-osciorul-pompilian-tofilescu-a288947.html
On Monday, it rains door locks and keys that fit asymptotically. On Tuesday, consciousness plays hide-and-seek inside the brain. At an intersection, social realism is sabotaged by robots assigned as schoolteachers in the countryside, while upstairs, humanity’s intelligence has been erased from the memory board. Pompilian Tofilescu’s prose bravely wrestles with the absurd and the ridiculous, relying on a fantastic domesticated by technical humor and gentle irony.
Maia Levantini
***
If novels belong to those who cannot write short stories, Pompilian Tofilescu draws fourteen novels out of a single volume of short prose. The apparent size of any one of these works is, in any case, smaller than what each of them truly contains. From a rain of locks — not frogs, as in biblical Egypt, but locking mechanisms — in a city with no opening, and a crack in the asphalt that may be nothing more, or nothing less, than the portal to the next nightmare, to an intersection where no road is what it seems, the author leads us through fourteen stories filled with humor, sadness, and mystery.
It is a pleasure to read Pompilian, and he seems to know it from the sparing way in which he allows us to read him only from time to time.
If you have found this title online, or if you are in a bookstore holding the book in your hands, do not hesitate: buy it. Read Dintele sau osciorul — what a strange title! It is worth it. You will see.
Liviu Surugiu
Reviews:
“Pompilian Tofilescu’s volume gives the clear impression that the author is opening doors. Each story ushers the reader into a space where reality is subtly altered until it becomes almost unrecognizable, yet without losing any of the stories’ inner consistency. Within this surreal context, and through a fluid style, the writer impresses us with the ease with which he conveys sophisticated ideas; by the end, he reveals himself as an author of remarkable narrative force.
After reading the first few stories, one realizes that “Tofilescu’s worlds” are recognizable and distinct, yet also something different from what is commonly found in Romanian speculative fiction. This is due to his openly assumed transrealism, used as a principle of literary construction. At times, it seemed to me that he measures out his imagination and delivers it with control, even though Pompilian Tofilescu clearly has the resources to take his texts in unexpected directions. Through this strategy, the sensation of realism persists, even though the reader becomes aware, at a certain point, that their perception has been altered. Surprisingly, I accepted this situation without resistance, because I perceived the author as deeply involved in what he writes.
Absurdity is also the cornerstone of his stories. Irrational situations are embraced without hesitation, as a natural state of existence; and when events and words repeat obsessively, they in fact acquire importance, personality, and the power to decide. The search for the perfect match — the key for every lock — becomes an existential problem and a metaphor for the loss of freedom and identity. Objects no longer suggest the whole, just as people come to subordinate their lives to artificial requirements, thereby losing precisely what makes them unique.
The characters are alive and intensely present, yet they always seem somehow unsuited to the environments in which they move. They experience failure, estrangement, guilt, separation, and the fragility produced by misplaced words or by impersonal social mechanisms. Through their complexity and through the bizarre situations that transcend reality, some of the texts acquire the breadth of serious novelistic possibilities, with wide-ranging cultural references.
Beyond their strangeness, the stories are sprinkled with humor, subtle irony, and spontaneous moments of release that turn the book into a provocative and charming read. The author’s literary toolkit extends beyond transrealism: the texts communicate with one another, or with other texts; at times they mirror familiar stories or fairy tales, while at others they engage with archetypes to which they grant new and unexpected dimensions.
The volume also has a social dimension, with autobiographical references placed around the year 1989. The author uses this perspective as a pretext for revealing a spiritual ossification in the characters who inhabit his literary universe; they are, in fact, reflections of a contemporary society that is increasingly indifferent, manipulative, and frozen in place. Human suffering, dehumanization, and the loss of innocence become recurring subjects because they are expressions of human decline.
The Tooth or the Little Bone is a surprising book, one that confirms its author as mature, profound, and multifaceted — capable of astonishing literary and spiritual incursions.”
Mircea Carbunaru