Novel
Galeria cu viță sălbatică
Not translated into English
Constantin Țoiu · 1976
Synopsis
In 1957 and 1958, according to Georgiana Panait, Chiril Merișor, an editor at the state publishing house, is expelled from the party for having defended a colleague. His situation worsens when he leaves a notebook of intimate notes behind in the fitting room of a clothing shop: full of moral and psychological observations, it falls into the hands of the Securitate and becomes the centrepiece of an investigation that makes him an accused man. Gripped by fear, Chiril develops, according to Paraschiva Butnărașu, a Kafkaesque psychology; the novel has been read as a monograph of hidden fear.
Context
The novel appeared in 1976 and made its author's name: it won him the Writers' Union prize in 1977 and that of the Romanian Academy in 1978. First classed among the novels of the obsessive decade, which censorship encouraged because they targeted the Gheorghiu-Dej regime, it also presents itself as a document of its time, born, the author said, of the observation of his own era. Butnărașu compares the hero's notebook to that of Nicolae Balotă, left on a train the night of his arrest, in 1956. Georges and Ilinca Barthouil translated it into French in 1981.
Who it is for
A long political novel in Romanian; readable in French under another title, with no English version found.
Prizes and reception
Very well received by critics and by the public, according to Paraschiva Butnărașu, who reads in it a meditation on the fate of the intellectual.