Fits

Most of the characters of Romanian fiction are outcasts and misfits and they duly suffer from it. This is not surprising, given the high speed of change experienced in the past two hundred years of Romanian history. When circumstances alter in such a rapid way, the individual

excerpt I was to deal with this vague feeling, this bizarre, somewhat abstract and pure love three times during my teenage years. I had come into this huge and empty room, lured by some strange music that I always found irresistible, insinuating, intoxicating and dangerous.

excerpt The following days, Mioara took the girls for a walk in Chishmigiu Park and treated them on a boat ride (the driver of the black car had rolled up his sleeves and was rowing across the lake, giving the ladies nice smiles from under his pointed moustache). Later

excerpt I paused a little in order to recall better the dark areas of my teenage years. I don't know why it is only about them that I feel like writing. But do I only have to write about them? Maybe the journal that I'm struggling every second not to finish the

excerpt After the snow, the numbers in the grounds of the church had grown scarce. The people did not have warm clothes, and notably not a thing to cover their feet. Then the blizzard commenced. When spring was drawing near, Mite would learn that uncle Minele had expired

excerpts The house of Maria Dragases is a small palace rising next to the western wall of the city, and from its orange-tree garden one can see the sea. The sun is now above the garden, its light has the color of a lime, and so is the light reflected by the fruit in the

It is amazing how many children are begotten from the sentimental exultation that one or the other of their parents feel for a third person, another than the partner in the respective action, irrespective if the person in question be a man or a woman. Sometimes this third

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

excerpts The contact with the air, the world, dazzled him as if he had been a novice passenger on a ship. He knew naught – whether he was sick or well; whether his frame would master the novelty, or if he was at peril with that new diet of his. Therefore, Ada had quickly

excerpt Dies iraeThey had loved each other since the second day, and in the days to come, as no one had loved before. Their love had been angelic and earthly both in one. Their souls had been suffused by heaven and brought almost to extinction by kisses with no end. They

In a village, the story goes, there once lived a lad who had neither father, nor mother, nor any other kin; so obscure was his lineage, in fact, that for all we know, he may well have dropped there from the sky. As the boy was meek, long suffering and slow to speak, the

Around 1820, Barbu Paris Mumulean thus concluded one of his poems: Hankering I will not fade / Cupid cometh but in aid / thus in luxury I may / crave until I wilt away. In actuality, these verses word the ideal of a generation that sets out to inventory, and answer for,