ístina
Novel , 2025
Empúries
Pages: 136
A 20-year-old girl starts a relationship with a former teacher of hers, who is much older than she is.
At twenty years old, Ístina—who is named after the Russian word used for absolute truth, that which lies beyond moral or personal considerations—attempts to find her place in the world through highly unusual transgressions: learning the Russian language, reading the classics, or seducing a man—a former teacher of hers—forty years her senior, in a relationship that both of them know has no future, but is pure present. Ístina explains it with no filters. Sometimes out of anguish and despair. Sometimes out of tenderness and love. But always from a loneliness that she cannot seem to shake off.
With Ístina, David Cirici has written an intense novella, full of literature and sensuality, which speaks openly about an unusual and counter-current relationship and, with a prose full of nuances and sinuosities, transcends the events of the plot to offer a luminous and deeply moving literary text.