LE TISSU DES PLANS NARRATIFS DANS LE ROMAN SONIA RIDICĂ MÂNA DE LAVINIA BRANIŞTE
THE FABRIC OF THE NARRATIVE PLANS IN THE NOVEL SONIA RIDICĂ MÂNA BY LAVINIA BRANIŞTE

Summary/Abstract: Lavinia Branişte is a young story writer, "top name in the new wave" (Iovănel, cover IV) or "the most important name in the prose of the 2010s" (Iovănel, 2021, p. 420). She started as a novelist in 2016, with Interior zero, followed by Sonia ridică mâna in 2019, a novel which received "Thoreau’s Nephew" Award 2019, Ateneu Magazine Prose Award, 2020 edition, Sofia Nădejde Award for Literature Written by Women, 2020 edition, Prose section. The film script on which the protagonist of the novel is working, inspired by Zoia Ceausescu’s life, the daughter of the dictatorial couple, and which will remain an "abandoned" project, becomes in fact a pretext for a series of forays into the past, both in Romania's recent past and in Sonia's. The novel is characterized by a skilful texture of the narrative plans. These plans correspond to "searches" which remain unsolved until the end of the novel. Everything remains under the sign of mystery, similar to life itself. First, there is a narrative plan that focuses on communism, through the investigations of the protagonist Sonia, from which derives that interesting past-present relationship. Then, a family relationship plan is developed, by relating Sonia to her mother, to the "absent" father for many years of her life and to Claudia, her step-sister from her father's second marriage. There is also a plan for "gender relations", built mainly by relating Sonia to Paul, her boyfriend who pretends to be a feminist, and to Vlad, the producer. As Mihai Iovănel observes, "almost all the men in the novel are in fact hypocrites or indifferent, clones of the emotionless father" (Iovănel, 2021, p. 423). But most of all, there is a plan built on the binomial Sonia and herself. Based on these premises, this paper aims to analyse the way in which h these narrative plans are combined in the novel, to show how Sonia's searches about Romania's recent past inspiring her in writing Vlad’s script coincide with the search for self, with the desire to understand herself and her own life.

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