Cursa rapidă

1982, the novel “The rapid coach” (”Cursa rapida”), 480 pages. A coach running without stopping between two large towns of Romania is caught in a blizzard at a motel, which is built on the shore of a lake. All the 45 travelers are besieged by blizzard for three days, staying without any food or heat. In the town, their families are concerned in starting on a trip to save them. The main characters of the novel are actually waited for in a spot quite isolated from the world, and the blizzard blows from everywhere mercilessly. Under these limit conditions destinies come across one another, characters reveal themselves. The climax of the unfolding event is reaches when, in the town, the architect who had designed the motel avows that, because of the economy policy imposed by the regime, the shores of the lake had been no more consolidated, and the motel is running the risk of getting crushed. In the meantime, the 45 passengers live a drama because of the trees overloaded with snow, and of the wind pressure, the earth starts cracking strongly and more and move strongly, and a piece of the shore, on which the motel is lying, starts slipping in to the lake. The passengers have time to be rescued. After a while, when the blizzard starts falling down, the safety team arrives also. “The rapid coach” is the best constructed novel of Constantin Munteanu, with the strongest characters and the best led actions. It presents the Romanian society in its whole complexity: from the political chiefs of the districts to the university professors, the managers of the factories, physicians, adulterine women, extravagant teen-agers, workers from plants, etc. The idea of the novel is that we cannot consider life as a rapid coach to get on, find a warm place and wait till it takes us the terminus.