Doina
Ruști

Published by Bookzone (2024), Zavaidoc in the Year of Love has been acclaimed as one of Doina Ruști’s most vibrant and cinematic novels, and was nominated for the “Best Work of Fiction of the Year” Award by Bookzone (Readers’ Choice).

Critics have described it as “a dazzling love story interwoven with mystery, history, and the rhythm of interwar Bucharest.”

The book captures the spirit of 1923 — a year of elegance, rediscovered hopes, and southern light — when Bucharest dreamed of being “Little Paris.” Through three intersecting voices, Ruști reconstructs a forgotten world, blending romance, crime, and psychological insight into a sweeping portrait of a city and its people.

Reviewers have compared Zavaidoc to The Great Gatsby, calling it “a Romanian echo of the roaring twenties” and praising its “magical realism, cinematic vision, and irresistible storytelling energy.”

Below is a selection of reviews from major Romanian cultural publications and literary critics.

It is a beautiful love story. A policier novel written according to all the rules of the genre, with skillful suspense management. Yet it is also a vivid snapshot of Romania in 1923 — a photograph of a society rediscovering the pleasures of luxury, elegance, and leisure after the wounds of war had finally closed. 1923: the year of regained hopes, when time itself seemed patient, even gentle with people; when Bucharest still dreamed of being “the Little Paris.” It was also the year of the legendary 1923 Constitution.

Doina Ruști’s novel could easily be turned into a film. The text brims with cinematic imagery: the interplay between panoramic and close-up shots, the whirl of action, vivid dialogue, and lush, sensory descriptions of scenes and characters. The central story opens onto smaller stories, returning to its core only after the reader has glimpsed the intricate structure of narratives nested within one another. It all stems from a world specific to Doina Ruști — a magical, believable, yet dreamlike universe where the extraordinary feels as natural as a folk simile. Typical adventures of a popular novel merge with the psychological depth of intellectual fiction, and the savor and energy of storytelling make you read breathlessly, believing that what will ultimately save the world is the story itself — the one that enchants and gives meaning in equal measure.

A passionate love story intertwines with crime and the life of a city shimmering with countless tales from a gilded age — an age that, even a century later, still sends rays toward its descendants, people who once knew how to celebrate, to love, and to live in every possible mood, from joy to deep drama.

Carol is unpredictable, still unburdened by a fully formed past — and thus free of trauma or complex. She belongs to that category of unsettling characters who hold up a mirror to others, confronting them with their flaws (in this, she vaguely recalls Lizoanca). Matilda, mature and elegant, is more attuned to the ethereal, floating atmosphere that permeates the narrative — yet also to its darker, gothic undertones, especially when the story slips toward the mysterious, with a surreal touch, as in Matilda’s flight: “Around me there was night, inside me darkness; and my flight was not through the city but through the mouth of a monster.”
Carol radiates the innocence of all beginnings. Matilda is the tragic heroine, the emblem of climax and decline. Zavaidoc in the Year of Love is also a southern novel — not only geographically but as a state of mind. Its Levantine atmosphere, bohemian indulgence, joviality, Balkan verve, and the warm, enveloping light of a world where History seems paused compose the ineffable charm of Bucharest — recognizable even today.
Let us not forget: Matilda’s most absolute declaration of love happens in this same sunny decor — “It was quiet. The southern light made the window seem endless. And then I said: ‘I’ll marry you!’” But this southern radiance, this bath of light and sweetness, is not a given; it is sustained by story — by the continuous burning of the artist. Beyond this luminosity lurk shadows, specters of cursed places that haunt Zavaidoc’s memories of his native Trivale Forest, near Pitești — a landscape still rich in dark urban legends: “Autumn in Trivale, haunted by ogres hunting for eyes.”
Each city, including Bucharest, seems to be a Janus-Bifrons — a contrast of the sinister and the sublime. The same duality appears in individuals, most strikingly in Dr. Carniol, another brilliantly built character — baroque, respectable in public, yet revolting and even diabolical in private.

I had the privilege of reading the manuscript as its editor. None of Doina Ruști’s books lingers so movingly on a single, complex, and enchanting year as this one. Zavaidoc in the Year of Love is a love story with an unusual composition, told from three perspectives that, page by page, reconstruct the life of Bucharest in 1923. Every page feels alive and real, carrying the reader into the everyday world of an unrepeatable era.

The novel weaves together multiple themes that give narrative depth and richness. Beyond the erotic layer suggested by the title, it also contains a detective plot, a historical and social novel — all leading harmoniously toward the book’s central message, a metaphorical sense of reading itself. From the myths of Bucharest to concrete realities, everything melts into a story that evolves from monographic confession to passionate confession. Within Zavaidoc’s palimpsest, we find everyday gestures and traces of an autobiographical novel. The multiple narrative threads create a kaleidoscope of sensations, images, and emotions that carry the reader through open boulevards, summer gardens, taverns, small family shops, and secluded attics.
Ruști’s novel brings to Romanian literature an unusual protagonist — one difficult to recognize in the surviving images of the time. The gramophone recordings from the late 1920s preserve the voice of an artist who, before the studio microphone — a novelty then — surely restrained his exuberance and freedom of interpretation. That is the singer Zavaidoc. But Doina Ruști gives us Zavaidoc the character — expanding the story into a meditation on life, destiny, and love itself. His vitality, his power to draw others into his world, almost nullifying their will, make him a unique, unrepeatable being, sharing with the historical Zavaidoc only a few biographical details. Zavaidoc is a pretext: the novel is not strictly about the interwar singer, but about life, joy, and the fleeting, meaningful instant.

Zavaidoc — and a chic window display on Dorobanți, as he deserves. I raced alongside Miss Carol, suffered with Matilda. But beyond the voices of these characters lies the Romanian Gatsby and the roaring twenties of Bucharest. Until now, I associated the “roaring twenties” only with Fitzgerald and America — yet the same dazzling, exuberant years were lived by those on the banks of the Dâmbovița. Zavaidoc is greater than Gatsby: he is the creator who burns with passion, who sings from the depths of his heart, the perfect embodiment of that time. He gives everything, lives entirely in the moment, never thinking of tomorrow — and sings again the next night.
After making the Phanariot era “cool,” Doina Ruști reveals another golden age when Bucharest was a kind of Paris or Vienna — a luminous metropolis, full of music and mingling voices, giving birth to stories upon stories, and true literature. Zavaidoc in the Year of Love belongs on Doina Ruști’s shelf beside her already classic works — novels that resist categorization. True literature cannot be boxed into neat genres. Ruști’s sentences seem spoken directly to you, not crafted to impress. No artifices, no contrived twists — just pure narrative rhythm. She said at the Museum of Literature that she wrote Zavaidoc in the Year of Love in about three weeks. She could have written it in one night, in the time of a single romance. Because she wrote as Zavaidoc sang and lived. It’s not only fiction — it’s our history.

From the first pages I knew it would rise to the top of my personal list. There are moments when, weighing how I’ve spent my time, this novel makes me grateful — a book that will leave a lasting memory trace. This isn’t a review, but an attempt to put into words the experience of reading it — a book that, once decoded, gives you chills and makes you wonder: what will I leave behind?

I read Zavaidoc in the Year of Love in manuscript — a deeply moving experience filled with curiosity, joy, and anticipation. I expected a fictionalized biography; instead, I found a novel full of vivid, magnetic characters, with “facts”, as the narrator Carol calls them — a story of action and mystery unfolding in interwar Bucharest. Three voices, three intertwined narrative lines — as surprising in their resolution as in The Mother of Two Cornflowers. Thank you for this emotional journey!

What is love, after all? A recurring question of our lives — one Doina Ruști refuses to answer with ready-made or predictable solutions. She lets Zavaidoc unfold freely, in a story that walks step by step with the reader, gliding between lived and imagined realities.
Zavaidoc feels fresh — freshly printed, but also freshly alive in the world today. Between story and spectacle, this is Doina Ruști’s challenge with Zavaidoc.

The novel’s weight comes from the power of its prose and the overflowing imagination of an original writer. Zavaidoc in the Year of Love follows an epic thread tied to the most popular Romanian singer of the interwar era, depicted in powerful visual and cinematic imagery and within a convincingly reconstructed epoch.

I read Zavaidoc in a single breath — one night. A superb book, written with mastery and style, weaving its narrative threads with detective precision, yet full of introspection and reflection on life, chance, and fate.

Zavaidoc in the Year of Love is also a reflection on destiny. How much do we influence one another? Are lost loves ever truly forgotten? Why do we cling to those with whom we share a past? Doina Ruști seems to juggle these questions — and more — while writing this novel. A simple online search reveals shockingly little about the man behind the name, Marin Teodorescu. I like to imagine that somewhere, in the folds of time, his voice still echoes through the gardens of Little Paris.

With her well-known cinematic imagination, Doina Ruști intuits that, to capture the attention of a contemporary reader, her story cannot stop — as early 20th-century novels did — at a simple love plot. She therefore adds a detective thread (the mysterious death of Dr. Carniol) and many subplots, all designed to build suspense and invite readers to piece together scattered clues. Once all the narrative strands are reunited, Zavaidoc reveals itself as a fascinating chronicle of Bucharest in 1923 — a story of an inspired artist, of pain that destroys and uplifts, of humanity and the divinization of man.

This is a book that gradually grips you — page by page, the story becomes more compelling. The interwar atmosphere of Bucharest is recreated with rare charm, and the elements of romance, drama, and mystery blend harmoniously. If I had to describe it in a few words: a complete book, offering passion, tension, and the rediscovery of both a man and an era — Zavaidoc and his years of glory.