Adela
Garabet Ibrăileanu
Adela
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Emil Codrescu, a doctor nearing forty, spends a summer at the resort of Bălțătești in the Moldavian hills and finds there Adela, the girl he once knew as a child, now a young woman. Through walks, conversations and small gestures, his diary records a love he analyses endlessly and never quite dares to declare.
About the book
Published in 1933, Adela is Garabet Ibrăileanu's only novel, presented as fragments from the diary of its narrator, Emil Codrescu. Over one summer in Bălțătești, near Târgu Neamț, Codrescu observes Adela, a young divorcée he has known since her childhood, and tries to understand what he feels for her and what she might feel for him. Almost nothing happens and everything is examined: a glance, a word, a change of mood. The novel is a study of hesitation — of age difference, self-consciousness and the fear of ridicule — written with a critic's precision and a lyrical sense of landscape. It remains one of the classic Romanian psychological novels. This edition is the original Romanian text.
About the author
Garabet Ibrăileanu (1871–1936) was a Romanian literary critic, theorist and novelist, and for decades one of the most influential figures in Romanian letters. A professor at the University of Iași, he was the guiding spirit of the review Viața Românească, which he edited from 1906, and he championed realism, social conscience and the specific character of Romanian literature. Late in life he published his only novel, Adela (1933), a refined psychological study in the form of a diary.