The Town with Acacia Trees

by Mihail Sebastian, Gabi Reigh (Translator)

Overview

Bored by religious instruction and painting lessons, a group of friends at a convent school spend their days dreaming of romance, fashion and the latest gramophone records. One by one, they give up their visions of adventure and submit to provincial life, marrying for money and status, like their mothers before them.

Plain, jaundiced Lucreția becomes the envy of her friends when Paul, a glamorous dandy, proposes, but she hides a shocking secret that will destroy their marriage and expose them to scandal.

Only Adriana Dunea, the most beautiful and talented girl in the school, seems destined for happiness with her childhood sweetheart, Gelu. But everything changes when, on a trip to Bucharest, she meets Cello Viorin, a famous composer…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912430291
Publisher:	Aurora Metro Books
Publication date:	03/20/2020
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 210.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Mihail Sebastian was the pen-name of the Romanian writer Iosif Hechter. Born in the Danube port of Braila, he died in a road accident in 1945. During the period between the wars he was well-known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays. His novel For Two Thousand Years is a Penguin Modern Classic.

Gabi Reigh’s translations and fiction have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today and The Fortnightly Review. She has won the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation and was shortlisted for the Tom-Gallon Society of Authors short story award. She is currently engaged in a translation project called Interbellum Series focusing on works from the Romanian interwar period, including the poetry of Lucian Blaga.

Editorial Reviews

Sebastian gives a remarkably sensitive, candid portrayal of the coming of age of a girl seen through the eyes of a suitor. The author’s sensitivity to the emotions of his heroine Adriana is captured vividly in this translation in such passages as “every kiss was a wound, in which their lips, their breath, their teeth, the tips of their tongues drowned, warm and wet, and parted slowly, with a final hesitation, leaving on each mouth a blurred, faded smile.” – Dennis Deletant, Ion Ratiu Visiting Professor of Romanian Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC

“Reigh handily preserves Sebastian’s supple, languid syntax, shaping each sentence to accentuate his exquisite lyricism, as when the couple remains unable to yield entirely to their desire “to be held in such a way that it obliterated everything apart from the ecstasy of the flesh.

An endearingly wistful story of young love.”  – Kirkus Reviews

“In The Town with Acacia Trees, Mihail Sebastian writes with the sensibility of a master jeweller. He crafts with precision and delicacy his characters’ intricate souls. Sebastian’s profound humanism, his utopian universalism, is as refreshing and urgent in today’s climate of rising nationalisms as it was in the interwar period. Gabi Reigh’s riveting translation matches Sebastian’s writing like a glove.” – Alex Boican, PhD in Romanian Literature

“He wonderfully captures the atmosphere of prewar Romania in all its complexity, all the beauty and the horror… I love Sebastian for his lightness, for his wit…” – John Banville, Booker prize-winning author, BBC4

From the Publisher

★ 2019-12-11
Romanian author Sebastian (For Two Thousand Years, 2017, etc.), in Reigh's (Poems of Light, 2019)English translation, offers a bildungsroman set in Romania during the interwar period. In this novel, a young man and woman fall in and out of love as they come to terms with the banalities of adulthood. As the story opens, it lucidly depicts the bookish, 15-year-old Adriana's reappraisal of childhood "with the weary eyes of a survivor" and the intensities of first love. Gelu is a 20-year-old university student from Adriana's unnamed town, and he's preoccupied with his own romance—but in the course of rescuing a depressed peer from an attic refuge, he and Adriana form a friendship. The author reveals how their bond builds, slowly and subtly, until they find themselves in a passionate tryst. Adriana floats in and out of Bucharest, pursuing her musical talent as a pianistwith the help of affluent relatives, and finds herself tangled in the lives of Gelu, whose studies are in the capital, and Cello Viorin, an impetuous and romantic composer. (The sensory experience of music is a repeated focus, in an evident nod to Marcel Proust's work.) The Bucharest backdrop—the university, the concert hall, the tram, the streetscapes—effectively recalls Sebastian's other works, but this novel expands on the tension between province and capital, which acts as a stand-in for the conflict between traditional and modern values. Adriana and Gelu, in the midst of a century-defining sea change, discover their need for each other even as they witness a marriage that ends in divorce, due to a previous affair between the wife and a nun, and another matrimony that becomes "something that destroys youth and drains desire." Reigh handily preserves Sebastian's supple, languid syntax, shaping each sentence to accentuate his exquisite lyricism, as when the couple remains unable to yield entirely to their desire "to be held in such a way that it obliterated everything apart from the ecstasy of the flesh."

An endearingly wistful story of young love.

Kirkus Reviews