Orașul cu salcâmi
Mihail Sebastian
Orașul cu salcâmi
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In D…, a small provincial town where the acacias bloom every spring, fifteen-year-old Adriana Dunea is growing up faster than her mother can follow. Between piano lessons, school friendships, her cousin Paul's unexpected infatuation and a first, secret love affair with the restless young Gelu, she discovers desire, freedom and the end of childhood — set to the music of a fashionable composer's songs.
About the book
Published in 1935, Orașul cu salcâmi (The Town with Acacia Trees) is Mihail Sebastian's novel of adolescence, written between 1929 and 1931. It follows Adriana Dunea through the years in which a provincial girl becomes a young woman: the gossip of a small town, the rituals of a girls' circle, the visits, the parties at the prefect's house, and a love that the adults around her can neither see nor stop. Sebastian writes it with lyrical lightness and a sharp eye for the comedy of provincial society, and with music — the piano, a song cycle, a suite for orchestra — running through it like a second plot. It stands beside his later novels as a delicate portrait of first love and of the town that frames it. This edition is the original Romanian text.
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.