Mircea Cărtărescu dreamed the night before that he was walking through an unfamiliar city with his son. Gabriel, who is 20 years old, was small in the dream and wanted to go to a toy store. “It was late afternoon and when we arrived the shop was closed,” says the Romanian writer. The child then started crying and a person appeared from inside, took the key and put it on the door. “Don’t worry, we’ll manage,” said the father. “I grabbed the key, opened the door and walked into the toy store with my son,” the author continues. This morning, Cărtărescu woke up in a hotel room where he stayed during the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL).
Mircea Cărtărescu this Tuesday at the FIL. Roberto Antillion
The dream goes into the author’s diary, a 17-year-old handwritten diary. “It’s another dream of hundreds of dreams I’ve written in 49 years,” says the author. There is a lot of material for his literature, “exuberant prose that combines fantastic and realistic elements”, as defined by the jury that awarded him the FIL Literature Prize a few days ago. For his book Solenoid, for example, he transcribed between 30 and 40 of these dreams. “Dreams give us an immense gift,” says the author, explaining: “We put dreams aside and believe that reality is everyday, but at night we live a parallel life.”
In the lobby of the hotel where Cărtărescu is staying, Elena Poniatowska is looking for her suitcase; Jorge Volpi appears at the elevator; Irene Vallejo is arrested to take photos; Rosa Montero comes back from breakfast and behind her comes Leonardo Padura in sandals. The Romanian author comes out of his room with his wife, the Romanian writer Ioana Nicolaie. An intense three-hour round of interviews awaits them in a carpeted and freezing room of the hotel. Cărtărescu sits without leaning back, crosses his hands between his knees and, bending slightly forward, generously answers each of the questions.
“I am a very humble person. I’m not proud to have written any of my books,” he replies to a journalist who asks him what his best book is. The Romanian language sounds like Italian. Critics said Solenoid, released in Spanish in 2017, was his masterpiece. Cărtărescu, on the other hand, compares the process of writing each of his books to a “birth”: “I think that’s what I was made for, there’s no reason to be proud, only very grateful.” His work in Spanish is published by Impedimenta Verlag and includes ten titles translated by Marian Ochoa de Eribe, who translates his responses into Spanish when the interviews are not in English.
The day before, when they were touring the FIL venue in Guadalajara, a young man stopped them to tell them that Cărtărescu’s literature saved his life; He rolled up his shirt sleeves and showed them a house that levitates without a bottom tattooed on its skin, the Solenoid cover illustration. “It’s one of the happiest moments a writer can have, not the Nobel Prize,” says Cărtărescu. This Monday showed a similar devotion. A young woman and her husband approached him with a two-month-old baby in their arms, and Cărtărescu fell silent. “Her name is Mircea,” the woman said to him. The name – pronounced like Mircha – was in honor of his grandfather, but also from him.
Mircea Cărtărescu chats with supporters outside the fairgrounds. Roberto Antillion
The shirt that Cărtărescu wears is printed with red butterflies. “The most graceful of creatures,” says the author. His Blending Trilogy is actually a book “in the shape of a butterfly”. The three books that make it up make up the anatomy of the insect with their titles: The Left Wing (2018), The Body (2020) and The Right Wing (2022). “First it is a humble worm, then it closes into a chrysalis and resurrects as a beautiful butterfly. Seeing its transformation, people compare it to our destiny,” he explains, adding: “It’s a symbol of immortality, an image of the human soul.” “Would you like to add anything else?” asks the last journalist to interview him. “Just a glass of water, please.”
Cărtărescu has an easily recognizable face in the FIL halls. The fine hair grows low on the skull at the level of the left eye and falls to the right in a narrow wave on the forehead. He’s surprised to see a whole wall covered with his work. Her gaze is restless like the buzzing of a bee, and when she speaks her upper lip remains rigid. He has a hard time walking down the aisles without being asked for a photo or autograph. He is one of the most important writers of his generation – he won the Formentor Award in 2018; It has been speculated for years that he could get the Nobel Prize – and today he looks tired. But the exhaustion dissipates when he enters the room, where more than a thousand young people applaud him. Cărtărescu greets them by shaking his stiff hands at head level, palms facing forward.
“I think they don’t know much about Romania, the poorest country in Europe,” Cărtărescu told the youth. “What makes us similar,” he said, “is more than what divides us.” Inequality, the “terrible dictatorships” of Romania – “three fascists and one communist” – and Latin America, literature “based on imagination”. Cărtărescu told them about his admiration for Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar; also by the Beatles or Bob Dylan as a long-haired young man of the blue jeans generation. He told them about his first novel, written when he was nine, and made them laugh: “Jack and Jim went into the woods and found a mysterious cabin. The hut was made of wood… And I didn’t know what to say anymore because I didn’t know how to describe the hut. In the end I drew it and solved the problem.”
Although Cărtărescu is a storyteller, essayist and literary critic, he sees himself primarily as a poet. After the age of 30, however, he decided to stop composing verse. “I felt like enough is enough that I’ll keep imitating myself.” But when the Covid-19 public health emergency began, he started writing “like crazy, 20 poems a day”. He published them in a “poor” book that was not translated into Spanish. “I felt the need, I don’t know why, but it saved my life. Because I kept having suicidal thoughts,” he had told a journalist hours earlier. He doesn’t think he’s broken a promise he’s kept for three decades: “I didn’t write it, the pandemic wrote it.”
Mircea Cărtărescu walks through the halls of FIL.Roberto Antillón
“Being a poet has nothing to do with literary techniques. I dare say with literature,” said Cărtărescu. A few days earlier, he had defended the literary genre at the FIL award ceremony in 15 minutes. “Poetry is not entertainment and the poet is not, as many still think, an outsider with his head in the clouds,” he proclaimed. “Poetry,” he continued This Monday, “is not about writing poetry, it’s a way of looking.” “Every single child is a poet, but then we lose it. If you’re still seeing the beauty of the world at 17, you’re a poet. I’m very proud that I haven’t grown up.”
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