Accidentul
Mihail Sebastian
Accidentul
3.83from 3,093 ratingson Goodreads
A fall on an icy Bucharest street throws Nora together with Paul, a lawyer who has given up caring what becomes of him. She takes him to the mountains near Brașov and teaches him to ski, and the accident of the title turns out to be the smaller of the two things that happen to him that winter.
About the book
Published in 1940, Accidentul follows Nora, a French teacher in Bucharest, after a street accident brings her into contact with Paul, a lawyer absorbed by an unhappy love affair. What begins as an accidental meeting develops through conversations, shared evenings and a winter journey into the mountains. Mihail Sebastian sets emotional hesitation against sharply observed urban and mountain settings. The novel is less concerned with dramatic declarations than with the ways loneliness, memory and desire shape ordinary choices. Its characters approach intimacy cautiously, carrying private histories that make even a new beginning uncertain.
Characters
Nora — Protagonist
A French teacher whose street accident leads to an unexpected connection with Paul.
Paul — Protagonist
A withdrawn Bucharest lawyer preoccupied with an attachment that has left him emotionally stalled.
Ann — Paul’s attachment
The woman around whom Paul’s emotional life has long revolved, even in her absence.
Gunther Grodeck — Young skier
A young man Nora and Paul encounter during their winter stay in the mountains.
Hagen — Mountain resident
A solitary man of the mountains whose presence belongs to the novel’s winter world.
About the author
Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was a Romanian novelist, playwright and journalist whose books are quiet, ironic and exact about people failing to say what they mean. He wrote them through the years in which Romanian fascism made him, as a Jew, a stranger in his own literary circle — friends who admired him signed on to the movement that excluded him. His Journal 1935–1944, published only in 1996, is one of the essential European records of that decade from the inside. He survived the war and was killed months after it, hit by a lorry in Bucharest on his way to give a lecture.