Novel
Wasted Morning
Dimineață pierdută
Gabriela Adameșteanu · 1983
Synopsis
One morning at the end of winter, in the Bucharest of the seventies, Vica Delcă, a former shopkeeper, old and poor, sharp-tongued, leaves her gruff husband to go on her round of visits. She calls on her sister-in-law, then joins Ivona, heiress to a fallen bourgeoisie. According to Gabriela Gheorghișor, over coffee the two women open an old photograph album, and the novel goes back to the years of the First World War, to the family of Professor Ștefan Mironescu, Ivona's father, whose diary mingles jealousy and war.
Context
Printing was completed in 1983, but the book reached bookshops only in April 1984, deprived of pages that the censors had removed and that editions after 1989 restored, according to Gabriela Gheorghișor. It won its author the prize of the Writers' Union, and Cătălina Buzoianu staged it. The same study reports that Monica Lovinescu, on Radio Free Europe in 1984, saw in it a novel of old age, that of the characters and that of time. Alain Paruit translated it into French for Gallimard in 2005, and Patrick Camiller into English in 2011.
Who it is for
A long novel in several voices, from the language of the outskirts to that of the salons and of a private diary; readable in French and in English.
Prizes and reception
According to Gabriela Gheorghișor, the most famous and most translated of its author's novels, which many critics have regarded as a masterpiece.
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