Growing up in Switzerland in a family of emigrants from socialist Romania, the author of “The Valley of Youth,” Eugene, hails simultaneously from the dusty Bucharest of the Ceausescu era, with its queues and caring public, and from the university, individualistic and prim Lausanne, one of the cultural centers of stable Switzerland 70 -s and 80s, where he will grow up in a high-rise building overlooking the villa of Georges Simenon, dream of a scooter, be a fan of Star Wars... It is this involvement in both cultures that gives Eugene the opportunity to look at both countries, and at his growing self at the same time, as if slightly detached, with soft irony and a special condescending wisdom characteristic of emigrant writers, even if they emigrated in early childhood.