In about a thousand pages, grouped in two parts, redrawing, over about twenty years, the slow and deep dissolution of an ordinary peasant family living in the village of Siliştea-Gumeşti (Teleorman), in the Wallachian Plain, Preda aimed to fulfil his credo ("without notions like history, truth, reality, prose would make no sense").
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Published twelve years later (the author wrote two more novels in the meanwhile) and surprising censorship and socialist-obedient literary critics, the second volume is mainly a distinct novel from the first one : except for the action place, the village of Siliştea-Gumeşti in Teleorman, the structure, the narrative technique and the style itself are different from Moromeţii I.