La Medeleni
Ionel Teodoreanu
La Medeleni
Every summer the Deleanu children come back to Medeleni, their family's estate in the Moldavian countryside: Dănuț, a dreamer who has just finished primary school; his sister Olguța, quick-tongued and fearless; and Monica, the quiet orphan girl who grows up alongside them. Over three volumes the kites, the quarrels and the endless summers give way to school, first loves and the question of who each of them will become.
About the book
Published in three volumes between 1925 and 1927 — Hotarul nestatornic, Drumuri and Între vânturi — La Medeleni is Ionel Teodoreanu's best-known work and one of the most loved novels in Romanian. It follows Dănuț and Olguța Deleanu and their friend Monica from the long summers of childhood on a country estate in Moldavia, through their school years, and into early adulthood. The first volume is childhood seen from the inside: games and rivalries, grown-ups watched with suspicion, and a whole mythology built out of a garden and a summer. The later volumes follow Dănuț to school in Bucharest and into his ambitions as a young novelist, and trace how the three of them grow apart and together. Teodoreanu writes in a lush, metaphor-rich style that made the book a touchstone of Romanian writing about growing up. This edition contains all three volumes, in the original Romanian.
About the author
Ionel Teodoreanu (1897–1954) was a Romanian novelist and lawyer from Iași, and one of the most widely read writers of interwar Romania. His prose is lush and lyrical, thick with metaphor, and at its best when it is about childhood — the private kingdom children make out of a house, a garden and a summer. La Medeleni, the trilogy he published between 1925 and 1927, follows Olguța, Dănuț and Monica from those summers on a Moldavian country estate into adolescence and the disappointments that come after it, and it remains one of the best-loved books in Romanian. He was married to the writer Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu, and his brother Păstorel was a celebrated epigrammatist. After the communist takeover he was pushed to the margins of literary life, and he died in Bucharest in 1954.