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Novel, Ego. Prose series, Polirom, 2012, 200 pages

Copyright: Polirom

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 Everything changes for Mia and Teo that spring morning when they first meet in the lobby of the Ministry of Agriculture. Love comes into their lives, so powerfully that it makes them leave everything else behind. It rids Teo of the suffering caused by separation from his ex-wife and children, whom he loses in the divorce. It helps Mia to regain her self-confidence, to forget that she is nothing but a humble functionary in a dusty ministry. Realising that she has never loved any man the way she loves Teo, she leaves her husband. At her insistence, he agrees to a divorce, resigns from the legal practice where he works, and retires to the countryside, where he takes up beekeeping. Confronted with so many obstacles and a painful past, Mia and Teo imagine that their love has something heroic about it. They decide to join their destinies together, hoping to find tranquillity thereby.

Visiting his children one day, Teo finds his ex-wife in tears. Devastated she tells him that her lover has left her. His regrets at having listened to her plaints all night long dissolve in the dawn light, when Lily makes an unexpected proposal: that he should come back to her and the children. Only a few months have passed since he met Mia, but it has been long enough for Teo to understand that her love will never cure his longing for his children. Teo’s decision to go back to Lily and her own discovery that she is pregnant plunge Mia into the blackest depression. One morning, on her way to the ministry, she is overwhelmed by her memories and realises that she has never stopped loving Vlad even for one moment. But how could she even begin to suspect that Vlad, in order to atone for his past mistakes, has decided to marry a woman he met at Sunday morning mass in the village where he has gone to get away from it all? Nevertheless, she manages to win him back quite easily. It is enough for her to convince him that their love is more important than his charitable urges. Reconciled that she has found the man alongside whom she wishes to grow old, Mia finally agrees to grant Teo a divorce. She is not overly saddened by the abortion she undergoes, and nor does she bother her head about who the father may have been. Countless things happen, but the characters keep going round and round in a circle, always ending up back where they started. Two couples whose members seem inseparable, but who succumb to the temptation of the new; two couples whose destinies intersect and who move within a society as devoid of will and certainty as they are. A story about the frailty of human feelings and the paltriness of romantic love.

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