Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's The Hidden Way completes and adds another dimension to the Hallipa trilogy. But although it sends the reader backward to the first two novels, The Disheveled Maidens and A Concert of Music of Bach, this last novel of the trilogy gets its view of life into an image with a compelling air of completeness. Drawing on the narrative innovations and cultural scenarios of Modernism, it extends those aspects toward issues of gender and the possibility of a female element within the Romanian society of the 1930s.

Ileana Alexandra Orlich