Reality Game Show is a novel with love stories turned obsessions, where the characters have no solution but death to break away from the trap. The society game that they participate in allows them to choose at will the moment they tell life "Game Over".
Press release
Anyone who knows Anca Maria Mosora is uncapable to understand how such a bright and tonic person can produce such a stirring prose. Almost nothing in her appearance betrays her inner structure. No one, intending to hide, could have found a better mask. Our author has the face of a German woman and the pen of a Russian one. It is hard to suspect that behind a smile with angelic modulations there is such supply of nostalgia, perversity and cruelty, visible only in the visceral twists of her writing. After years of knowing only her innocent mask, discovering her contortions made me experience a kind of frightened consternation. How many people can reach such a perfect duality? And how many can turn the disguise of their life into a fertile lie of art?
(Sorin Lavric)
A misterious society game concocted by a vengeful character attracts those who don’t have the courage to face their failures, regrets and perverse wishes in its vicious circle. Progressing inexorably towards the fatal moment of The Game, Anca Maria Mosora builds up a novel of morbid slowliness. Death hides behind each page, is unbearably postponed, knotted in the weaving of the characters’ thoughts, details and gestures that reveal vanity, but most of all a huge frustration.
(Marius Chivu)
Excerpt
The stranger entered the room looking changed. One could see that during the minutes she had waited in the hall her condition had worsened. She was pale and almost all the traces of self confidence she had displayed in her short dialogue with Masha had been wiped off her face. Nevertheless, her movements betrayed an elaborated, long practiced and now successfully displayed determination.
Petrescu motioned to her to sit down. He had watched her come in not knowing what was it in her appearance that attracted his attention. She wasn’t a beautiful woman. The moment he thought at that, he realized that she wasn’t about beauty. There was something odd in the stranger’s structure. Her features seemed to struggle between an innocent air rarely visible, when she blinked more often and tiredly, because of the pain, and something very sharp, bad or just worsened in time. This dissonance on her face arrested the doctor’s glance. She was the kind of woman whose face changed with the moods that crossed it. The woman felt she was being watched and slightly frowned.
“My name is Vera”, she said suddenly, “Vera Damian”.
The doctor said nothing. He meticulously opened a register he took off the piles of papers on his desk and wrote her name in it. Then he looked back to her face, which was surrounded by an ocean of hair in a disorder that could have seemed calculated.
There was silence for a few moments. Then, after waiting in vane for Petrescu to ask her anything, Vera started to speak. She explained the condition that had made her call on him. Repeated dizziness, lack of sleep, pronounced fatigue, fears that came out of nowhere, sometimes panic, cold sweat, a difficulty in breathing that came always in the evenings, like a sensation of suffocation or like a scarf that coils around the neck and there is no way you can unfasten it. No feeling coloured her face while she was speaking. She looked neither frightened, nor worried. She had come to him mostly because she was pushed. She knew the cause of those symptoms so well, that she felt her presence there was meaningless. She only stated them, as if she had read them from a page written long time ago and read so many times since, that she almost got to learn it by heart.
Petrescu listened to her carefully and asked a few more things that strengthened his first impression, that her condition was exclusively of a nervous nature. Nevertheless, he asked her to have some blood tests and wasn’t in the least surprised when she took them off her handbag. He looked at them and found that beside a lack of vitamins, which would have never brought the effects described by Vera, everything seemed normal. He then asked her if she was having those test regularly — hoping that he was facing a hypochondriac —, but Vera told him quickly that she had gone to a couple of doctors before and that one of them had suggested those tests, to make sure what treatment he was going to advice. Petrescu looked disappointed for a moment. He took another look at her, impressed by her tranquility, by that distant way of speaking about herself as if speaking about an image of herself in the mirror, something that had no physical, direct connection with her.
He wondered what was it that pushed this young and apparently strong woman to depression — at least that’s what he’d thought it was at the time. He would have liked to search more thoroughly. Suddenly he felt the need of dissecting inside her, of slowly sliding into the universe of her dispair, so scarcely manifest on the outside. He knew he couldn’t do that, he didn’t have the necessary time or experience. Nevertheless, he was curious. His theories about melancholy, that fascinating disease, so ramified in its effects and so difficult to seize, had never been confronted with depression. A pacient he could have observed during all stages of the disease’s evolution and involution would have been of great interest to him. There is nothing like practice; having to do with a real case was everything he’d wanted. Especially with nervous system conditions, where subjectivity, the pacient’s nature, concrete data of her life can dictate absolutely remarcable distinctive notes.
