Moromeții

Moromeţii I is the first novel in the series, written at the time when Preda was known to the public and critics for his short stories.

Ilie Moromete, his wife Catrina, their children Ilinca, Tita and Niculae, and Ilie's older sons from a previous marriage, Paraschiv, Nilă and Achim, seem to live, although not excepted from difficulties, a regular life. Their story, covering a couple of years in the late 1930s, is in some way the negation of the opening phrase of the novel: "In the Danube fields, a few years before World War II, it seemed that time was very patient with people; life was going on here without major conflicts".[2]

Starting several pages later, time itself seems to have accelerated, with the rhythm of peasant life replacing that of nature. The Morometes, like many other peasant families who received small plots of land in the reform, have to pay land taxes - which accumulate with each passing year. The debt, worsened by the low crop prices following the Great Depression in Romania is only the starting point of Ilie's turmoil: he, a respected figure in the village community, has to face not only the shame of fighting the tax collector but, in what is the actual drama, the incomprehension of his family. Indeed, the three older sons do not stand their stepmother and her children, and want their father to sell a particular plot of land and split the sum with them - the brothers are also planning to start new lives in the capital Bucharest. Braving Ilie's refusal, they run away from home with the family horses, stealing their stepsisters' dowry. Moromete ends up selling a part of the land, paying back the tax debt, and ceding to his wife's request to pay tuition for their youngest boy Niculae.

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.

Moromeţii II focuses on a collective character - the village. Following World War II, a new, communist-regime world is being constructed, with its specific social ties and concerns. The moral conflict that constituted the theme of the first volume evolves into a social one, the land collective property, englobing the first. During forced collectivisation, a process that dramatically changed rural landscape, an aged Ilie Moromete, abandoned by his sons and his wife, left by his old friends, no longer seems to be able to fit.

Relevant pages describing Moromete make points against the "new society" credo of his youngest son Niculae, by now a young man sent to his own village by the Romanian Communist Party to carry out propaganda in favour of new collective farms. Denying merit to communism and its goal to eliminate private land ownership and transform peasants into farm workers, Moromete dies proud of "having lived like an independent man".