One could argue that their novels’ narrative fabric exists primarily as a device for reflection. Both writers summon strange figures to an oneiric imaginary geography, slipping in and out of the dramatis personae that is above all a way of constructing a form of hermitic autobiography. Their writing appears, from what is translated heroically into English, to be marked by a transgression of genre, seeking instead to dance in the spaces between realism, magical realism, poetry, essay and analysis. What is it that draws close the writing of Mircea Cărtărescu and Maria Gabriela Llansol? They are both European writers in the broad sense that they call upon a common pool of themes, myths and visions.
Two writers I keep returning to over the last few weeks, at night particularly, trying to understand why these two have captured so much of my waking and dreaming attention. That sounds like a description of my reading mind. It would be easy for this blog to become a whirlpool, rotating obsessively around a small handful of writers that, to my mind at least, carve out a highly individual niche perhaps a series of whirlpools that interconnect only at the periphery, and in doing so twirl off creating other eddies and vortexes. Posted in 20th Century Romanian Prose, Ancient Roman Literature, Romanian Literature | Tagged Augustine, Mircea Cărtărescu | Leave a reply ‘We have no models, we have only precursors’ Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding, translated by Sean Cotter. There’s so much necrophilia in memory! So much fascination with ruin and rot! It’s like being a forensic pathologist, peering at liquefied organs! their interactions as they mix with each other’s images and emotions. the tension and discord between my present mind and my mind a moment ago, my mind ten years ago. I write about the way my present brain wraps around my brains of smaller and smaller crania, of bones and cartilage and membrane.
You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past.
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