The latest addition to my website is Dumitru Tsepeneag‘s Pigeon vole (Pigeon Post) . This is a witty and clever post-modernist novel, written in French and set in Paris. An unnamed author, who may not be the author who is, in fact, another character created by the narrator and who plays chess is trying to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ioana Pârvulescu‘s Viața începe vineri (Life Begins On Friday). This is an unusual Romanian novel as it is not grim. A coachman in Bucharest in December 1897 finds, separately, two men in the snow. The first, Dan Kretzu/Crețu, is disorientated and, for the course of the book, does … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dan Lungu‘s Raiul găinilor [Heaven for Chickens]. The novel is set in Acadia Street, during the post-Nicolae Ceaușescu era. Most of the people that live there are retired and not very well-off. The novel is a satire on both modern Romania and on these people, who drink a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Liviu Rebreanu‘s Pădurea spânzuraților (Forest of the Hanged). Our hero is Apostol Bologa. He is ethnically Romanian – his father had been imprisoned for his role in drawing up a memorandum of the grievances of the Romanians in Transylvania which, till 1918, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zaharia Stancu‘s Desculț (Barefoot). We follow Darie, a young peasant boy from the beginning of the 20th century to World War I. However, the main focus of the novel is the sufferings of the Romanian peasants. The peasants are continually victims – of the boyars (rich landowners) and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maria Maïlat‘s La cuisse de Kafka [Kafka’s Thigh]. This is a semi-autobiographical novel. Her heroine is called Mina Baïlar. She is born in Transylvania, part Jewish, and has a not particularly easy childhood. However,she becomes first a gymnast and then a writer but the Romanian authorities ban her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gabriela Adameșteanu‘s Dimineață pierdută (Wasted Morning). The novel gives a panorama of Romania and its sufferings from the beginning of World War I to 1975. Much of what happens we see through the eyes of the seventy-year old Vica Delcă, who has had a hard life. Her father … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Augustin Buzura‘s Recviem pentru nebuni și bestii (Requiem for Fools and Beasts). Much of this novel is set after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989 but, as the title tells us, Buzura does not think things have improved much. Matei Popa is the editor of a crusading … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Petru Dumitriu‘s Incognito (Incognito). It is set in the period after World War II but before Ceaușescu took power. Our hero is a Romanian government official who had had trouble with the authorities but has now been rehabilitated. He wants to go abroad with his wife, officially just … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gib Mihăescu‘s Donna Alba. Our hero, Mihai Aspru, has a colourful early life , running away, working on ships and trying to join the Foreign Legion in 1915. Back home he joins the Romanian army in World War I but survives, though his father, a doctor, dies. Back … Read more