4 ideas
On a winter day in December 1897 a man turns up on the outskirts of Bucharest with no believable account of where he came from. His manner and speech are subtly out of place. The reader knows, and the people around him do not, that he comes from the present and carries knowledge of the century they are about to enter.
A vanished period is rebuilt most convincingly from its trivial daily print: advertisements, prices, weather, small crimes, society notes and gossip. Grand events do less of this work. The ephemera show what people worried about, bought and joked about, which gives the past a lived density that chronologies of politics and wars miss.
Characters in 1897 look toward the new century with confidence in progress, technology and civility. The reader and the time-traveler already know about the world wars and totalitarian regimes to come. That gap in knowledge turns ordinary optimism into poignancy, so the Belle Époque reads as a fragile last peace rather than a stable normal.
The novel is told in alternating voices, including a doctor, his children, journalists and a police investigator, and each sees only part of events. The city emerges from the overlap and friction of these partial viewpoints. No single narrator describes it whole, so the place itself becomes the real protagonist.