Life Begins on Friday

A few years ago, my sister took a trip to Bucharest, Romania. She picked up some souvenirs while there, and knowing how much I love books, she decided the perfect gift for me would be a book translated from Romanian. She selected Life Begins on Friday by Ioana Pârvulescu, first published in 2009 before its English translation came out in 2016. Thank you, Rachel, for this amazing gift! I finally read it this month as part of my January Challenge to read books in translation.

Life Begins on Friday by Ioana Pârvulescu
Translator	Alistair Ian Blyth
Audience	Adult
Genre	Historical Fiction; Historical Fantasy
Setting	Bucharest, Romania
Number of Pages	266
Format I Read	Paperback
Original Publication Date	Romanian Edition: 2009; English Translation: June 2016

Official Summary

A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. The stories of the various characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. The novel covers the last 13 days of 1897 and culminates in a beautiful tableau of the future as imagined by the different characters. We might, in fact, say that it is we who inhabit their future. And so too does Dan Creţu, alias Dan Kretzu, the present-day journalist hurled back in time by some mysterious process for just long enough to allow us a wonderful glimpse into a remote, almost forgotten world.

Pârvulescu’s book is a magical tale full of enchanting characters who can carry the reader to another time…

Winner of the EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

Review

Life Begins on Friday is set in the final 13 days of 1897 in Bucharest, Romania, and it follows a large cast of characters going about life’s mundanities… as well as a murder mystery and possible time traveler. Dan Creţu is a present-day journalist who has inexplicably woken up at the end of the 19th century, and his proximity to a dead man puts him at the center of a murder investigation. His strange (modern) way of talking certainly paints him as the bizarre leading suspect! Costache is leading the investigation. Meanwhile, a little boy named Nicu is hoping he has the winning lottery ticket so he can stop working full time and better provide for his mentally unwell mother. Then there’s Iulia, a young woman in love and slowly working her way through the novel Vanity Fair. Only two of the characters (Dan and Iulia) get first-person narratives; the rest are in the third person.

With so many characters, it can be hard to maintain the same level of interest from chapter to chapter. Some characters are more interesting and important to the overall plot, adding momentum to the narrative rather than slowing it down. This book would have been stronger if it followed fewer characters—especially Iulia, Nicu, Dan, and Costache, who were my personal favorites—and dropped the POVs of the more superfluous characters. This would have tightened up the pacing and made the book clearer. Though if I’m honest, I don’t think the author’s intention was to make it clear. Quite the opposite! The writing style is quirky, somewhat old-fashioned, and I think the whole vibe works with this more cluttered approach to storytelling.

The story takes place in Bucharest, Romania—my first time reading a book set there! This is a country I’d love to visit someday, and I enjoyed spending some time there via Life Begins on Friday. I hope to read more novels set in Romania soon.

Final Thoughts

Life Begins on Friday is a unique book and I enjoyed it overall, even if it wasn’t always as focused as I’d prefer. This is a novel I’d recommend to people who like books in translation, stories set in Romania, and fans of literature that doesn’t fit neatly into just one genre.

About the Author

Credit: Mihai Benea

IOANA PÂRVULESCU was born in Braşov, Romania. At the age of 19 she moved to Bucharest, since when she has become very attached to the city’s history and stories. She attended the Faculty of Letters in her new city. After graduation, like many of her colleagues, she was assigned to teach at a country school with the result that she commuted between a country village and Bucharest for 7 years.

Her real literary life began after the Revolution of ’89. In 1993 she became an editor at Romania literară, a literary magazine where she published a weekly column for 18 years. She launched and coordinated the “Night Table Books” collection at Humanitas (a major Bucharest publishing house), which ran for 10 years. She has published over ten books, and also translated from French and German (Maurice Nadeau, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Angelus Silesius, Rilke etc.) She is best known for the titles she has published at Humanitas: Return to the Inter-war Bucharest (imaginative non-fiction, 2003), In the Thick of the Nineteenth Century (2005) and Life Begins on Friday (2009), which is her first novel and has been translated into Swedish (Stockholm, 2244/ Bonnier, 2011), Hungarian (Typotex 2015 ), Serbian (Helikis 2015), French (Seuil 2016) and others languages.