The novel Abraxas was published in 2022 by Polirom publishing house.

Having grown up surrounded by the apocalyptic tensions of a broken family, torn between an artistic mother, a painter with a toxic personality, and an adventurous but strict father, Michi Lucescu isolates himself from the world, in the attic of an old house. Chiţ-Chiţ ― his pet name ― spent his childhood and adolescence in the Bucharest of the last communist decades. He moved between his paternal grandparent’s apartment in a Ceausescu-era tower block, looking down on the Valley of Weeping in the famous Tineretului district; or with his mother in a fabulous building next to the Jewish cemetery, which sported two stone lions guarding the entrance and stained-glass windows. The architecture of the real spaces subtly resonates with the inner architecture of memory. The character, through a sort of dreaming recollection, goes deep into “the heart of darkness” and reveals scenes from his own life as well as characters and stories from different times and places. As he wanders through the apartment building of his memories, Michi opens the doors to 11 flats, one after another, simultaneously becoming the viewer and the protagonist of spectacles of failure and self-destruction. His roaming brings him to the Vienna of the psycho-sociologist Jacob Levi Moreno, to the Paris of Ilarie Voronca and the New York of the writer Delmore Schwartz ― all people hailing from Romania.

The novel thus becomes an impressive shadow show, suggestive of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings, in incisive prose peppered with visual and sensory arabesques. A confluence of light and darkness, similar to the personality of the god Abraxas, the novel ingeniously documents the evil and the melancholy of the world, and unashamedly believes in the power of literature to redeem.