"Considered one of the best novels of Romanian postwar literature, Wasted Morning is a modern chronicle of seven decades in Romanian society, from 1941 to the mid-1980s, from the time when Bucharest started to be a 'Little Paris' to the decay of Ceausescu's bleak dictatorship. Time seems to be the main character, but the novel's exceptional heroine, Vica, a colorful, gossipy witness with a harsh tongue—a kind of Leopold Bloom in a skirt—unites the many layers of this great narrative in a seductive mixture of irony and pathos, gravity and ridicule, social-political turmoil and the fervor of a vivid inner life. Powerful, subtle, original."
—Norman Manea, author of The Hoolgan's Return: A Memoir and Compulsory Happiness.
Gabriela Adamesteanu is remarkable both for the quality of her writing as well as for her brooding gaze, which encompasses, with some cruelty, nearly a century of Romanian history. Wars, persecution, shortages, privations, and censorship are among the calamities that emerge, woven together by the sheer strength of her prose."
—Le Monde
"Wasted Mornin is, doubtlessly, a painful symbol of a Romania sacrificed for a century on the bloody altar of war and communism. These sinister specters haunt the writer, driving her to recreate in this truculent, furious work the popular parlance and lyrical street language of a country in which the wooden official language had grown into a coffin for the imagination."
—Lire