The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York is pleased to announce the publication of WASTED MORNING, Gabriela Adamesteanu’s first novel in English. Upon its original publication in 1983, Wasted Morning catapulted Gabriela Adamesteanu to the first rank of Romanian novelists. She has since been translated into many languages, and now her most famous novel is available in English for the first time. Translated from the Romanian by Patrick Camiller, “Wasted Morning” is published by Northwestern University Press with the support of the Romanian National Book Center.
“Considered one of the best novels of Romanian postwar literature, “Wasted Morning” is a modern chronicle of seven decades in Romanian society, from 1914 to the mid-1980s, from the time when Bucharest started to be a ‘Little Paris’ to the decay of Ceausescu’s bleak dictatorship. Time seems to be the main character, but the novel’s exceptional heroine, Vica, a colorful, gossipy witness with harsh tongue – a kind of Leopold Bloom in a skirt – unites the many layers of this great narrative in a seductive mixture of irony and pathos, gravity and ridicule, social-political turmoil and the fervor of a vivid inner life. Powerful, subtle, original.” – Norman Manea
