Our Circus Presents

The Birdman, our narrator, climbs out on to his window ledge every single day to test himself, to see if he can manage to kill himself, and yet he never does. The Birdman belongs to a strange circus of failed suicides, each member pursuing an absurd way to end it. One saves up lost-dog reward money to buy enough whisky to drink himself to death. Another sleeps with as many women as he can hoping to contract a fatal disease. He only manages to catch curable venereal diseases. Thus it is their inability to brave the conviction to die that sparks a lot of the black humour.

A chance encounter with another failed suicide that leads to an actual death sends the Birdman into a crisis, forcing him to confront his desire to disappear completely and his inability to have a serious go at ending it all forever. His passiveness and willingness to allow things to happen to him result in a series of unfortunate incidents from which he must emerge, a series of theologising and philosophising about death and in the end all there is is the crushing realisation that death involves actually dying. A novel of black humour, absurd, self-referential irony, and great sadness from Romanian author Lucian Dan Teodorovici.