Short

excerpts IThe Tomb The Royal Church bells of the townlet of Bucharest were pealing rhythmically in a mournful voice, whilst, from the hillock in sight, the small-rounded belfry of Bucur's little church was echoing back the toll in a wailing-remote fashion. It was

The first woman characters of the modern Romanian literature were anything but womanly. The Romanian romantic theatre and the historical romances of the nineteenth century abound in strong-willed, ambitious princesses, exasperated by the lack of guts in their male partners.

“Between little Adela and her ‘maestro’, the fortyish Emil Codrescu, was born more than the ordinary love between a child and a full-grown man. The seeds of subjugating passion and resigned worship are sowed, above parental love, and last until Adela’s teens, when

excerpts Almost every night I talk to Adela on the porch. The ladies go to sleep earlier. Adela shows an attentive, almost submissive, sympathy to the maestro. She is, however, more personal in opinions than before. But what is going on inside her? When she talks it always

excerpts The Diary and Its Readers We should not overdo it with diaries and letters. We usually tend to deem them more revealing of the man than his public work. All that is secretive, familiar draws us as if it were a confession. It is the pleasure of breaking an interdiction,

* Excerpts from an interview with prose writer, political analyst and journalist Stelian TĂNASE (Observator cultural no. 121, 18-24 June 2002) Why did you choose to publish At Home We Speak in Whispers at this particular moment? Books come and go in a writer's imagination.

6 March 1960So I am finally taken out as well, led inside an office hid in that tiny niche of the arched corridor; examined, identified, undressed. I am only left one towel, one bar of soap, one toothbrush, one toothpaste, two pairs of socks, one shirt, one pair of underwear,

Preface In April 1990, I handed over the volume The Silent Escape to the Secretariat of the French publishing house La Découverte in Paris. On September the 1st, the same year, the book was in the bookshops. It's my first book and I don't consider it literature.

vol. II: 1937 – 1960 XXIIII begin to discover America… Chicago, December 10, 1984. For a whole fifteen minutes I have been standing by my window, staring blankly out into the street, without even understanding why. I got up from my desk because I thought it had started

excerpts Fighting for an idea for forty years – the idea of liberating your country from communism; never yielding for one single moment, being consistent in this action and in this hate (constantly fuelled and substantiated); organizing your despair, turning it into

January 5, 1940 On Monday I must get down to work seriously and consistently. Apart from this, my life has become unbearable. I don't know what the devil is the matter with me, I feel as if I were growing old and stupid. I suppose I have some obsessions of my own,

*  Sunday, March 31, 1940Rotten weather. I stay indoors and work, bringing my Diary to date. The French and the British hold frequent, definitely long conferences – now in Paris, now in London – attended by militaries and politicians. This incessant activity evinces