"Many characters and overlapping stories can cause confusion but never boredom ..." reads Publishers Weekly in the recent review of "Little Fingers', by Filip Florian, translated from Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 2009).

Read full review here.

• Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2009: Discoveries, by Susan Reynolds
  "Fingers are missing -- freshly severed fingers from a grisly, newly discovered mass grave in a Romanian village. Petty bureaucrats, magistrates, monks and archaeologists attempt to date the grave and solve the mystery of the missing fingers. One archaeologist sits on the veranda drinking marjoram tea and brandy and listening to his landlady's stories. There is factual evidence, and there is divination -- by cards and coffee grounds. Time passes in layers -- great sheets of collective and individual memories. Filip Florian lives in Bucharest. In this, his first novel, written in 2005, his writing is reminiscent of Poe and Dostoevsky -- we enter the mind of a madman and are not sure where reality begins and ends. The writing is deliciously foreign, even in translation: "The wind is chilly, and it has a taste, a taste of mulberries. The boat passes by a white poplar. Over the water hang scattered streaks of haze, whelps of mist. The boat leaves behind a row of dwarf willows. A bluish-black night, like ink!"
  
  
• Newsweek, November 19, 2009: Still Scaling the Wall, by Stefan Theil
  "In Little Fingers, by Romania's Filip Florian, the discovery of a mass grave triggers a reevaluation of the social order in a small town, where many of the old perpetrators still run things."
  
  
• Words Without Borders, July 23, 2009: Romanian Literature is Hot: Filip Florian’s Little Fingers , by Bud Parr
  "It’s a bit hard to describe the novel: To begin with, it’s a satire about a small town reckoning with its history, both the recent past, the Communist regime, and the Roman occupation in the ancient past. Also, it contains the life-stories of a few of the elderly people in the town; those are perhaps the most vivid parts of the book, these incredibly detailed short biographies. Added to this is the story of the priest with a magical affliction and an obsession with the Virgin. And the love story. And the history of Argentina over the past forty years as seen through soccer. And it keeps on going…"
  
  
• The Complete Review, August 5, 2009: Little Fingers, by M.A.Orthofer
  "Little Fingers turns -- very loosely -- around the discovery of a mass grave near an archaeological dig at the spa resort W. in contemporary Romania. It's a "bottomless pit" writes one newspaper -- and journalists and locals alike are convinced it traces back to: "the executions ordered by party chiefs in the past", despite the fact that there seems to be no physical evidence of executions (bullet holes in the skulls, for example)."
  
  

• The Front Table,  July 10 , 2009: Little Fingers, by Nicole Perrin
  "In a small, post-Communist Romanian mountain town, schoolchildren discover a mass grave near an archeological dig. It hides, everyone assumes, the work of party chiefs and their firing squads. Military prosecutors “refuse to accept the evidence,” according to a daily newspaper—unlike Major Maxim, the local police chief, who is more than willing to accept the fame associated with such a morbid investigation."
  
  

• Literary License, July 1, 2009: Little Fingers, by Gwen Dawson
  "The discovery of a mass grave filled with human skeletons in a small Romanian town is the animating event behind Little Fingers, Filip Florian's first novel and also his first work available in English. Is the grave evidence of a brutal genocide carried out by the former regime, or is it nothing more than a centuries-old collection of plague victims? This mystery serves as a rather feeble framing device and is quickly overshadowed by this novel's riotous and quirky assortment of stories and characters. There's a photographer with a camel, an aunt with prophetic dreams, a monk with hair that grows eight inches every four hours, an old man who fishes for pigeons from the top of a tower, Bolivian musicians, Roman ruins, Argentinean archeologists, and much more—all in about 200 pages. Little Fingers is messy and filled with loose ends, but it's also wonderfully imaginative. Ultimately, Little Fingers makes the point that we see only what we want to see, conforming our realties to our imaginations."
  
  

• The Quarterly Conversation: Little Fingers by Filip Florian, by Annie Janusch 
  "Florian pursues these themes in Little Fingers, a slim debut novel of untamed imagination in which a mass grave is discovered during an excavation in the Carpathians. (The little fingers of the title refer to a military official who hordes the pinky finger bones recovered from the grave like tiny charms.) The darkly lovely narratives that unfold from this premise are not concerned with providing satisfying answers for why the bones are there; rather, they act as instruments in the art of storytelling. Essentially, Little Fingers is a series of peregrinations on a theme, loosely related variations from which no single truth can be derived—even in the face of the “truth.”
  
  

• National Geographic, July, 2009: Adventures in Archaeology, by Don George
  "In the absurdist Little Fingers, by Filip Florian, a young archaeologist investigates a mass grave unearthed in a small mountain town in Romania from which fingerbones keep disappearing each night. Colorful supporting characters and overlapping story lines weave a wry yet sensitive tapestry of post-Communist Europe."