Humanitas

Too Late

excerpt THE MURDERER COMES OUT INTO THE LIGHT The prosecutor's office. Costa, Enache, Munteanu, Oană, the gendarmes lieutenant. Costa has pinned to the wall the general layout of the mine working. He looks like a teacher at the blackboard. Gentlemen, I have decided

Puppa Russa

Dies estexcerptsHe would kiss her and caress her breasts clutching them (as if her breasts were mere rubber balls), and he couldn't figure out just how much cheap male instinct, and how much true passion, was hiding behind his gestures. Those were the gestures of a

Blinding: The Left Wing

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

Le Soir Qui Tombe

Years ago, I experienced a peculiar evening. My life is far from eventful, and the few significant occurrences I do remember have been sucked for all they're worth in my books. There are, nevertheless, among their number some which, for a variety of reasons, I couldn't

On Intimacy

I lived in Amsterdam for a while, it now feels like a different lifetime, perched in the attic of a Flemish house along Watergraafsmeer. The rest of the three-storey building accommodated the owner, a lady of Polish descent, and her rubicund daughter. They would have a bath

Return To The Interwar Bucharest

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

The Abiding Wounds

excerpts Most traditional stories move from a bad start to an agreeable conclusion. The story I am going to share with you falls short of the traditional canon. For one thing, it begins agreeably enough, only to draw to an unsavoury conclusion with ambiguously loose ends.

Religious Conversion In 19th Century Moldavia

The baptized JewIn the late 1990s I had planned to include at the end of my book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian Culture a chapter entitled The Baptized Jew. As I worked on this subject I realized that it had been extensively discussed by the historian Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu

The Images Of The Nations. Ethnic And Ethic Characteristics

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

Who Is Eginald Schlattner?

Who is Eginald Schlattner and what story is he telling in his debut novel? For the readers in Romania, the Lutheran priest aged 65 who lives in his parish house at Rosia, near Sibiu, where he lives in a community mainly made up of Romanies, Romanians, and only a few Saxons

The Beheaded Rooster

see movie trailer excerpt My grandfather was called Goldschmidt, H. H. I. G. Goldschmidt, and he came from Schirkanyen, near Fogarasch. He was a Saxon of Transylvania, coming from a family eight hundred years old! and, documents could prove it, a pure German for twenty five

Bucarest-Paris, Aller Simple

Soulignant l'apport des écrivains, dramaturges, poètes venus de la sœur latine roumaine, Robert Sabatier fait cette remarque, dans le 6-ème tome de sa monumentale Histoire de la poésie française, celui consacré au XX-ème siècle: . . . mais il est vrai que