This book is a novel depicting Nero as a very complex character.
Laura Luna tells us:
Nero... How many of us have wanted—at a painful crossroads of life—to be Nero? To thoroughly burn down to the ground, at least ideologically speaking, everything that has ever been built and watch it burn until our eyes get charred. Or to turn our back on it and feel blaze down to the marrow of our bones, while we walk away. I did want that. And I could not do it. Therefore this book burns me with every one of its word.
I would have liked to be Nero. The one that Nicolae Cristache has reconstructed. I would have liked to be that Nero who set ablaze Rome, the Eternal City, the prostitute that fed on tears, vices and compromises, the one who lured him and in whose embraces he lost his innocence.
History, another unforgiving prostitute and liar, will unjustly remember him only as a first-order fire setter. This is exactly how history has sent him to us over the centuries, as the incendiary emperor. And none of us has ever thought of doing him justice anymore. Or none of us has had the courage, except Nicolae Cristache. He has been the one to shatter prejudices and go into the most hidden corners of Nero’s mind in order to build a true-to-life character out of a man whom History had turned to ashes.
As a consequence, if you expect this book to be a pattern-observing novel, whichever those patterns might be, you are wrong. Expect to read and read again. To reach the middle of the book and then to be taken by the action back to the beginning again, in a bewildering manner. After that, to start afresh from square one. Start afresh with other thoughts and other expectations, each time within the mind of a different character. “The Unknown Nero” is not the one you expect him to be. He is not even the one he seems to be. Paradoxically, despite of the fact that his masks are discarded one after the other, in the end some of them still remain, tightly stuck together. Those are the masks we will never stretch our hands to, as we do not know whether behind them there is the deepest darkness or the most blazing light.
I could not be Nero. Nicolae Cristache, however, has built a Nero for me. And for you all. So that we could purify the City in our souls, that urbs aeterna within us. He has given life to all-shattering characters, built out of a dizzying game of lights and shadows, just the way each one of us is, and he sets a mirror in front of us. “Look, if you dare!” Do you dare?
Laura Luna
