How did you penetrate the public space ?
Soon after my first book the main editor of Tages Anzeiger (n.red. n.red. another important news paper in German speaking Switzerland) proposed me to collaborate. Ever since I publish a column once a month. This is a space where I am a person with opinions. I must express them openly, publicly and assume a responsibility already when the text is being conceived. The creation process goes hand in hand with the responsibility, one must be aware of what one says. I lost the naivety I had in my first book, which partially I wrote it for myself. This has good but also bad aspects: self-control, awareness could lead to blockades.

Did you experience blockades ?
Now, while writing my third book I stepped on a wrong path. I lost myself in a jungle of ideas and ambitions. One yearlong I wrote things that I must review now.

What led you to the third book ?
My first book is mostly biographical. The second has also a biographical subject but the creation process, the adjustment of the text increases. The autobiographical parts are decreasing and they go to the background, they are less obvious. In the third book I am even less involved, even though, in the background I still have a personal theme.
My first book was describing in an anecdotal way, the life of a boy during communism, his muscular malady and the trip to America for the operation, his return and adolescence in Romania. The book surprised Westerners, sometime even with enthusiasm. The readers expected a dark literature, which would stick in your throat or stomach unable to be digested and suddenly, this book comes poetical and light. People said „ah! we can also speak about Eastern Europe in favourable terms“. Here lies the success of my book

Maybe also because of the natural humour ?
The humour and the perception. I used a trick: I created the boy character that sees the eastern world. That’s how I managed to describe it easier. Had I created a grown up character, he would have analysed differently the life around him. There is a lot of literature written by dissidents. But I left as a teenager and felt neither able nor entitled to present the communist world with control authorities and secret police as this kind of literature does.