Sfîrșitul înserării

1989, the novel “The end of the dusk” (“Sfarsitul inserarii”), 450 pages. Chronologically, the action of this novel is previous to the novel Teona. The young writer Mihai Vladeanu is looking for his way in life and in literature, while, in parallel, his father, Neculai Vladeanu lies paralyzed on a bed in an asylum for old people. He remembers the years of his youth, of the epoch preceding the Second World War. The novel is a “dumb” dialogue between father and son. The father asks himself the question: “what do I leave to my heirs?” and the son is troubled and obsessed by the idea: “what shall I be able to do with the things my predecessors have left me, what shall I do more and better than they?” Young Mihai goes on a trip to China, where he meets Viorica, a former friend from his childhood. Viorica had escaped and fled from Romania a long time ago and is, now, a specialist in genetic technology in USA. She proposes to Mihai to do the same and accompany her in USA, but he refuses, although in Romania his novels are not published, and the movie he has made is forbidden. The idea of the novel is that in Romania, from the beginning of the eighties the “dusk” of the society was over and the communist night had begun. In this atmosphere, people still hope that a better future will come, and they passionately live their love stories. In the novel, the young writer Mihai Vladeanu has many love stories, but each of them is unique in its way. All these love stories make up the facets of a diamond, and without them the beauty and the value could be no mare possible in the whole splendor of the diamond; the diamond is our own life itself, if we know how to live it, in a fine way and with dignity. The novel has passed through the Censure with difficulty (due to the help of the redactors of the publishing house), but after it had appeared in the bookshops, there were discussions if it had to be forbidden or not. The good luck of this novel was that in the autumn of 1989 there was a great congress of the Romanian Communist Party, and all the attention was concentrated towards this event; then, in December, the anticommunist revolution had taken place.