“I spend a lot of time reading this book, not because its sheer big volume, but because I just didn't wanted to finish it. I confess that I was having an acute crysis of what I call "autumn ache" when only Mihail Sebastian's journal and Duke Ellington could make me feel better. I even remember that I felt like I didn't communicate with nobody as I did with Mihail Sebastian. He was a jew (his birth name was Iosef Hetcher) intellectual in the 30thies, ne from that brilliant generation of young intellectuals that Romania had in the interbellic. he had close friends like Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, Emil Cioran (I belive that those are the best-known names abroad),but that abandoned him because of their fascist sympathy. This Journal is best known for the detailed and acute narration of a jew intellectual's life in those years, the absurdity of antisemithism, and how he was forced step by step to abandon his dignity, his self-esteem, his chance for at least a normal life, because not only he got fired from his job and couldn't find any, but he was even refused simple and inocent pleasures like ski and music. but this Journal is much more than that! we discover Sebastian as a great man, highly intelligent and sensitive, with a strong sense of ethics, his warmth and melancholy, his love for Proust and classical music (he actually made me love classical music, he gave me a certain hunger for it). He managed to keep his integrity during the war, to endure all sorts of humiliations and rough situation, and survive. his life ended tragically in 1945, when he got run over by a truck in the centre of Bucharest...his journal, published after almost 50 years from his death, raised controveses, as it offered an inedit insight of those years, and changed a lot the way we perceive that period and some of its important personalities. but what made me love the book and long for its writer, was Mihail Sebastian' s personality, his sharp and sensitive intelligence, and the feeling of connecting with another life, another man who survived only by its journal.”