Pushed around by ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languag- es, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.
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Pushed around by ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languag- es, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.
“Gabriela Adamesteanu is remarkable both for the quality of her writing as well as for her brooding gaze, which encompasses, with some cruel- ty, nearly a century of Romanian history. Wars, persecution, shortages, privations, and censorship are among the calamities that emerge, woven together by the sheer strength of her prose.”
—La Monde
Gabriela Adameșteanu is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and translator. She is the author of the acclaimed novels The Equal Way of Every Day and Wasted Morning, and is the editor of Revista 22.