Mircea Cartarescu is a Romanian writer, essayist, literary critic, poet, and university lecturer. His style struts the line between the magical realism, New Wave, and reverie of the obscure. In a wonderful feature for Sign and Sight, Jorg Plath calls him "the man who has made Bucharest mystical", turning the dismal greys of communism to a "metaphysical superstructure". Plath walks us through Cartarescu's past:
In 1980 Cartarescu's writing focused on the everyday. At the age of 24
he joined the legendary university "Monday circle" led by literary
critic Nicolae Manolescu. "Faruri, vitrine, fotografii" (headlights,
window displays, photographs) is the title of his debut work published
that same year. "We moved from the European poetry tradition to the
American, we wanted to be faster, harder, more powerful." Allen
Ginsberg, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara were the models for the
"Eighties Generation", who dedicated themselves to the reality of here
and now and survived unscathed at the university despite their
dissident views. After producing three volumes of poetry as a student
and while working as a primary school teacher on the outskirts of
Bucharest, Cartarescu began writing prose. The narrative round dance
entitled "Visul" (the dream) appeared in 1989, two months before the
revolution. The original title, "Nostalgia" was ruled out because of
the Tarkovsky film of the same name, the first story cut out by censors who judged it to be too violent, and Elena had to be renamed Maria to avoid any possible association with Elena Ceausescu.
After
the revolution "Nostalgia" could appear uncensored and Cartarescu could
finally become a university lecturer and travel. As we leave the roof,
passing some scrawny plants, he tells of the initial shock felt by
Romanians, who were used to shortages of everything, on first entering
the West. In the meantime Cartarescu has got used to the West: "Since
1990 I've spent half my life abroad."
Here is an excerpt from "Nabokov in Brasov", translated by Julian Similian, which can be read in full online, courtesy of Words Without Borders:
I wasn't listening anymore. I was slowly waking up. Oddly, thinking of Securitate, the most unlikely and stupid things were coming to mind: a long line to get beer at Bucur Obor, hundreds of people and a very nervous individual shouting when a few gypsies tried to cut in. "He's from Securitate, I know him," an old man told me with a kind of respect. "He's got power to put things in order." In my apartment building there were many people from Securitate, I played with their children. I recalled the jokes about them, Mother's warnings to be careful what I said, because Securitate was everywhere. Who were the people who worked for Securitate? What was Securitate? And why was it my fate, like a bad joke, to become a man with someone who worked for Securitate, even though she was only about to become one of them? I let her speak, I let her try her best to convince me (herself, really) that she was doing the right thing, and so she went on and on with her plea to the void, long after she realized I wasn't listening to her anymore. I could barely see her face. Through the paper-thin walls of the building you could hear everything: someone flushing the toilet, voices on the TV, music . . . After she finished she lit another cigarette and silently smoked it to the end. Then she stretched "voluptuously" next to me, kissed me "sweetly," caressed me obscenely-no quotation marks this time-and wanted to start from the top. I pushed her hand away and told her, like an automaton, without feeling the "drama" of that moment, that she was an idiot, that she would ruin not only her own life but the life of many others as well, that I didn't want to have anything to do with her if she took that step. And in fact, if she'd already accepted, what did she want from me?
As usual, the burden of other people's desires disturb the landscapes of everyday life. For more written by or about Cartarescu, explore the following:
- "The Gypsies: A Romanian Problem"
- "Eastern European Prejudices Regarding Homosexuals"
- "Two Romanias"
- Two poems: "I'm Smiling" and "The Blonde Beast"
- A selection of Cartarescu's poems in Romanian
- "Mircea Cartarescu on men who have something feminine about them"
- On expectations of Barack Obama
- On culture and money
- On the history of the Roma in Romania
- Nostalgia
- Excerpt from The Roulette Player
- Blog entries about Cartarescu include ABC of Reading, Errata 1, Masters of Drama, Blog About EU & Romania and Elly
