An exceptional literary tribute, The Price of Honour by Anișoara Laura Mustețiu, explores Romanian heritage, identity, and the deep emotional bonds that shape our lives. Dedicated to her mother, Constantin Maria, from Bucerdea Vinoasă, Romania, this novel bridges nostalgia, resilience, and the power of storytelling.
EMBRACING THE PAST WITH LOVE
This time, dear readers, I find myself in front of an exceptional book. THE PRICE OF HONOUR by Anisoara Laura Mustetiu. I won’t recount its narrative thread, which I leave for you to discover on your own, but I will present to you what makes this book stand out in its own unique way, in my opinion.
Life itself is a story with its enigmas, unknowns, and unexpected paths. What could be more beautiful in the world than dedicating a book to your own mother? In this case, it’s Constantin Maria from the village of Bucerdea Vinoasa, Romania. We carry our mother’s icon in our hearts and depart with it from this life.
This book is like a visit to the countryside, to a Romanian family that welcomes you in a truly Romanian manner, allowing you to get to know them as they are. Hospitable, the author extends her hand to us with her heart in her palm, like a Romanian offering you a glass of water, only this time the glass is filled with her soul.
In a fairy tale land, in a Sânzâiene’ Valley, with a splendid name for a locality, we meet Măriuca! A being of light, a beautiful girl who, from a young age, chose to live her life in prayer, as she saw her parents do, in symbiosis with nature, in her own peaceful Eden where she enjoyed both work and dance.
At the age of 18, she already has a life philosophy, inherited from her family, in which human values are sacred. Yes, in the Sânzâiene’s Valley, a fairytale place, a place of eternity, where “peace serpents like the quiet of a prayer” towards the mountains, the author allows us to discover the real life, the life in the countryside, in each household, in each soul, “on these lands sanctified by their labour and sweat, fragranced with prayers and countless tears.”
The village church, the cultural centre, the school of 1968, make me go back in time, as I experienced that period fully. But the charm of this return is given by the fact that the author seems to lead you by hand through these places, which she artistically sketches, dressing them in peace, in tranquillity, in a divine river from which you cannot escape. It’s like a grandmother spinning the thread from the woollen ball and following it to the end. It is a thread of a story, only it’s a true story, about real people and their experiences, intertwined with angels who “made their way to peoples’ homes.”
The book represents the story of Măriuca, whom we already know from the first chapter, a young girl, a delicate being, but who has proven over time to be a mountain of dignity, whose personality is defined throughout the book. A book which you can read easily, and once you start reading, you can’t stop, because you can’t. You enter the lives of the characters, you live with them, wiping each other’s tears, filled with truth, from your faces.
The truth of these people is sharp and harsh, healthy from their point of view, because that’s how they inherited and lived it, carrying it around their necks like a heavy burden. A world where compromises come at a high cost. The parents’ upbringing was quite tough, but they knew that it was the only way to succeed in life.
Mother Lenuța and father Anton Șurianu, a hardworking and diligent man, live in a world where life has always followed the “unwritten laws, passed down from ancestors,” and where “men’s sins were forgiven, but a woman was never spared.” Măriuca’s parents considered her a heavenly gift and wanted her to become a teacher in the village.
Impressive is the overflowing sincerity with which these people spoke to God: “Lord, forgive my weakness!” Impressive is also the celebration of wheat, with its crown of wheat, an authentic way to intertwine life with the spirit of nature, a Romanian tradition, a pastoral countryside celebration. The spirit of the last sheaves in the field had “the mission to protect and perpetuate a new rebirth.” People celebrated their gratitude for the harvest, “the giver of daily bread,” and not just any way, but in traditional costumes.
The beauty of these celebrations, with unquestionable ethnographic value, is depicted so delicately, with the author’s soulful mastery, creating reality through her writing to bring us joy as well. In a few places in the country we still observe such rural celebrations, but most of us learn about them from writings by those who love the Romanian village. In fact, she writes a book for the Romanian village, with its life, its universe, its rituals, and legends, traditions that Măriuca fully embraced and proudly celebrated.
The village dance, the meetings of the young people, the whirlwind of love that takes roots, is an ancient element of folk traditions, where destinies turn as true paths, the paths of destiny, of narration, intersecting and communicating with each other.
And as nature has always been close to the Romanian’s life, in this real story, Măriuca’s confidant is the “walnut tree,” a companion to the loves and sufferings of those around it, with which she shares her loneliness. The garden is enchanted, and the walnut tree is personified. It knew how to listen and was a model of existence. She wanted to be strong and proud like him in the face of life’s trials. The walnut tree has an ancestral energy, a silence that envelops you but also allows you to be yourself in the face of reality.
Life in the countryside is lived on various dimensions unlike in the city, and compared to today’s life, it is almost completely different.
One aspect that the author masterfully portrays is the life philosophy of these people, pure and genuine, as she discovers from their experiences: “solitude is just an invention of humans”; “worldly mysteries are not unravelled in the heavens, but on earth”; “happiness is a revealed mystery, which shivers with an avalanche of emotions”; “The heart doesn’t need explanations. It has its own laws”; “We rise through love!”; “Dreams are versatile”; “there is a rare quality that some people acquire over time… the ability to see a person in their depth, in their soul”; “The human mind has the capacity to see beauty in everything, but that doesn’t mean it’s real.” Experiences and reflections that captivate us and transport us into the characters’ world.
What impressed me the most was the way the concept of “time” is presented, a theme that “fulfilled its purpose” in the Sânzâiene’s Valley… “It washed the wounds of the heart, erased insignificant things from people’s minds”… “a daydreamer, distracted and carefree” or “a sage who wrote precious truths,” “an illusionist, juggling between eternity and transience”… “an artist who painted everything with the brush of harmony”… “A great magister, giving existence its measure.”
In the Sânzâiene’s Valley time seems to have a different nature, a time that belongs to another dimension, a space of emotions, where people’s existence is recorded as poetry in the soul.
In this painted world with its deeply ingrained focus in popular psychology, Măriuca was to carve her own path. She was too young, too lacking in life experience, to understand the world with its norms and traps. She allowed herself to be guided only by her pure and innocent heart. Disappointed, her pure love suddenly becomes “dishonour and sin.” She had to face the village’s laws, its customs, her parents’ mentality, a society that judges more than it helps. But she follows her destiny.
The inner turmoil of the characters in their various roles, be it Măriuca, her parents, or Ionuț, is depicted with their profound emotions, each caught in a continuous struggle between what their minds tell them and what their hearts desire. For Măriuca, “The Heart and Mind are like the Moon and the Sun,” both essential to maintaining life in this fragile balance. It’s no wonder that everyone seeks answers from God, always present in all their trials, as well as in moments of gratitude.
With the light of faith in her soul, she faces life challenges, leaves her parents, goes to the “City on the Bega,” trying to raise her daughter on her own, even though the longing for her first love tormented her. The cry of love did not give her peace, but she convinced herself to be strong! Only God “was her consolation.” She learned to survive on her own, far from her father’s anger, from the harsh judgment of the village, and fought to regain what she believed she had lost: “Honour.” “The child was also the testimony of her sin.”
In a society dominated by the harsh laws of communism, where individual freedom was obstructed, a single woman with a child was something hard to accept. But God had mercy on Măriuca’s child, Ana, so that she could have a father.
“The little girl was a conqueror. She embodied God’s desire to exist. She was human love continuing its course. She was the miracle that overcame all obstacles. She was a pure testimony that here on Earth, divine laws prevail over worldly ones.”
In a parallel storyline, Ionuț, the teacher in the village, burdened by fear of responsibilities and full of doubts, the one who disappointed Măriuca’s love, marries Haiducu’s daughter. But it seems that the paths are arranged from above. He has the chance to secretly see his child. And Ana talks to the walnut tree, which was a witness to her mother’s many experiences.
The author provides a subtle analysis of the psychology of women versus men, in the context of popular psychology and thinking, with all its consequences. She asks questions, seemingly wanting to understand the inexplicable: “How far will people go to preserve their honour?” And the Universe responds, “Until there is no turning back… But many of them do not realize that honour, without kindness and justice, has no value…”
A beautiful way to integrate the discussion of the church bell, the white church, angels who sing when love blooms or weep when it ends, with stars and the moon sighing.
Life lessons, learned experiences in which the main character concludes truths, even if they hurt: “Love is above all human law”; “If people were better, there would be less suffering on earth”; “The greatest human mistakes happen when people rush to judge”; “Love never dies, for it is the visible and endless image of God.”
But the author tells us in the book’s conclusion that “the best learning is always not from books but from deeds,” and we confirm this truth, which life presents to us starkly.
A confessional writing, with action unfolding on multiple planes, surprising developments, strongly marked characters by life, yet beautifully constructed and presented, with captivating writing that makes you reluctant to put the book down.
The volume is sprinkled with aesthetic word constructions that pleasantly surprise you: “her curious thoughts”, “yellowed moments”, “moments of peace and harmony strung on strings of light,” “the church crosses seemed alive”, “time seems to burn with jealousy”, “she wrote her emotions on the walls of the stars”, “the heart of the town was beating”, “Life continues its course, dragging along, like in a giant net with fish, the destinies of people”, “Amidst the bars of an illicit love, the heart watched over her daughter,” “The shadows of the morning”.
In addition to this, there is the author’s unique style that envelopes you like an anointing oil, complemented by the superb graphics that fulfill the creative universe of the writer.
The book is beautifully structured, with each chapter having a leitmotif, a preamble that seems to warn you, carefully chosen writing, an impression left behind or one that will stay with you. The author writes simply, smoothly, from the heart, fluently, with great intimacy and pain. The ideas are clear, direct, and go exactly where they need to. There are pages soaked with tears, both when they were written and undoubtedly when they will be read. It’s an inner emotional consumption that naturally flowed into the book, into rivers of intertwined emotions in words. The narratives often resemble a confession, made with the decency and humility of a woman who struggles with life, who is a survivor.
I would like to highlight certain aspects of this volume that I believe deserve to be appreciated, understood, and interpreted. First and foremost, the epic substance of the book, Măriuca’s drama unfolds against the backdrop of the village, in correlation with its rhythms and pulsations. Here, we have an extraordinary monograph of the Romanian village, where life unfolds ritually, following inherited patterns. We get to know the village with its traditions, customs, and rituals, the organization of households, families, the hierarchy within the family, the special connection with the church, with pre-established and strongly internalized patterns, in their struggle for everyday life.
Secondly, the destiny of the main character, the inner drama, is delicately captured in a specific context, in a society where you fight, in the loneliness that you only truly understand in the end. A status that the main character assumed by constructing a wall against loneliness because, in fact, loneliness is an exam that each of us passes alone, with God as the witness, and our conscience assigns the grade.
Indirectly, the book invites us to reflect on a forgotten truth, namely that Woman carries within her the mystery of creation and being. Her wise wings caress the gateway to the new creation that the sacred abyss’s mystery opens, stopping the wheel of time, only to bring back, as a state of grace, the childhood of the world. Is she appreciated? She hasn’t been and still isn’t… She struggles in the hostile world in search of the supreme truth, as the only salvation from non-being, reminding us of the wisdom of the Egyptians to venerate women, to believe in the primordial law of love, in her power and blessing.
These are values that modern civilization has forgotten, ignoring the fact that she, the woman, takes responsibility for this world, being led by intuition, emotion and intellect, having the power to probe things in the fluid and profound darkness of her own cosmic and boundless world.
But what impressed me the most is that this book is written through the eyes of Ana, who grew up full of love, compassion, acceptance, and understanding. She accepts her past, embraces it, and places it where it belongs, in her heart. The proof of this is this very book, written and gifted by her, to us and to her mother.
In a world full of lovelessness, it’s good that ANIȘOARA LAURA MUSTEȚIU reminds us that only through true love does a person find their purpose to “be,” just as God conceived existence. Let us love and only love! Let us love and forgive! A Christ-like love that must be bestowed!
We have before us a realistic novel with nuances between the psychological and the social, with life lessons in which everything flows like a confession, about the dramatic lives of the characters. A subject treated in a unique manner, with a confessional style, delving into the psychological, a volume with wise life lessons for all ages that manages to pull you out of the chaos of today’s world, to take you into the whirlwind of the inner worlds of the characters, inviting us to reflect on a literary creation that deserves all our attention and appreciation.
From the author’s literary CV, we learn about the path of her life, which is impressive just like her creation.
Through what she has written, the author has given herself, being a person able to offer joys from her heart.
My joy was great when I discovered a wonderful writer there in Australia, where Romanians have not forgotten to think and live in a Romanian way!
So, I invite you to a fascinating read, sprinkled with deep emotions, which extends a benevolent hand to you, urging you to live your life beautifully and dignified, in truth and love, for both your fellow humans and God.
With all admiration for promoting the cultural values of our people, I thank the distinguished writer ANIȘOARA LAURA MUSTEȚIU for existing, for virtually bringing us together through writing, and for this wonderful spiritual gift to the readers!
I look forward with interest and joy to your future literary releases!
With sincere admiration for the author,
Prof. AURELIA RÎNJEA
Member of the Writers’ Union of Romanian Language and of the World Poetry Association, Romania
