Băgău is a one-of-a-kind heroic-comic telethon that unfolds over seven days, in the era of confusion and degeneration that Romania entered immediately after a revolution in which hundreds of young people died for freedom. But in capitalism, freedom costs (and demands) money. Andreea, the heroine of Ioana Bradea's novel, is on duty at the erotic phone line where she works on a Friday evening, when the temptations of the weekend are much more heated. The fauna of clients who call her is diverse, spilling out in lexical cascades that make the novel a bric-a-brac of sensations and outpourings of apoplectic erotic natures. Satire, parody coupled with the protagonist's inner drama mix a vortex of states and feelings in which a major part of the illusion of time lost in the first years after the fall of communism is to be found. What seems scabrous at first hearing, however, is actually the echoing and cathartic effect, the critical deafness that the author places on the disgraceful, the deformed in the callers' little lives. A girl who believes in love and the beautiful gifts of life records for us the horrors of the world as it is...
Considered a novel-cult, versatile and intelligently written, Băgău, author Ioana Bradea, was published in 2004 by EST Publishing House, an international publishing house run by Samuel Tastet, known especially for editing Henry Miller's novels.
The novel, reissued in 2020 by Humanitas, gives voice to a hidden voice, to uncensored femininity, the inner voice of all abandoned, confused and forsaken women, thrown into the morass of the post-communist world. A novel of the breakdown and transition to a world in which gender difference is a fine theory marked by brutality and confrontation with the "demons" of capitalist society, but also, in the words of one literary critic, with "the inexhaustible gallery of men caught up in aggressive and toxic fantasies".
Nicolae Coande
