The Observer Translation Project

…The novel has two planes. It begins and ends on the plane of the present in which Madam [Vica] Delcă goes on her visiting tour, beginning in the morning at her sister-in-law’s…and carrying on through a visit to Ivona Scarlat, wife of a lawyer, himself the descendant of au upper bourgeois family of the old days. Evening catches Vica there at Ivona’s together with the news that the other’s husband has died suddenly. At Ivona’s, drinking coffee and talking of one and another, Vica looks at an old photograph of the family that her hostess elucidates. Here, we enter the novel’s other plane in which a world gone by resurrects, right on the threshold….of the Great War…