Interview Cartarescu

Interviewers: In contemporary literary discourse, there's a lot of talk about so-called

autofiction. Would you yourself consider this book, with all of its surreal splendor, a
work that is strongly autobiographical?

Mircea Cartarescu: First I have to try and remember this old book of mine, because it was
published seven or eight years ago. Since then I have written six or seven other books. Now
I’m going to release a new novel. I’m trying to remember and get myself back in the
atmosphere of Solenoid, which is in my very modest career maybe the second most important
book, following the trilogy called Orbitor [of which the first part appeared in English as
Blinding], which has also been published in Dutch, translated by the same translator, Jan
Willem Bos, an excellent translator and great friend of mine. That trilogy was in a way the
plane carrier of my modest fleet, or the most important ship inside of this fleet. Solenoid is
another very, very important book for my career. Solenoid is a metaphysical book. The first
thing that I have to say about it is that it's metaphysical, it is a “vertical” book, directed to the
skies.

Also, it is an ethical book, which is very much preoccupied with human destiny and with the
distinction between good and evil. I think that is the biggest topic of this book, which in a way
starts from a parable in one of Albert Camus’ stories ["The Artist at Work"], where one of his
characters is lying on his deathbed and he pronounces his last word. The people around him
cannot understand whether he says “solitaire” [solitary] or “solidaire” [solidary]. This is a
dilemma: to be with the people, to share the fate of the people all over the world, or to be
alone, to be aloof, to be only concerned about your work, about your goals, about your
dreams.

This is also the dilemma of the main character in Solenoid – a character with no name – who
teaches at a high school on the outskirts of Bucharest and who dreams of becoming a writer.
And just because he couldn’t become a normal and “banal” writer, he becomes a true writer.
A writer similar to Franz Kafka, for example. A writer who doesn’t play the game, who writes
only for himself, who writes not for the readers but for God. This character has always had
this dilemma.

He wants to be saved. He’s looking, in a metaphysical and theological way, for his salvation.
When this salvation is offered through a portal in the walls of this world, but only to him, he
realizes that he doesn’t want to be saved himself if the other people are not saved. So he
prefers to stay with his family, with his little daughter, with his friends, and lead the life of the
“normal” and real people on this earth, rather than to be saved himself. This is a sort of a
message, if you want, the message of the whole novel. In this novel, I felt for the first time in
my life what happens inside the human soul when one has to decide about one's fate.

Gabriel García Márquez has always been an important influence on your work. Is
Solenoid, both in its very title and through its ultimate conclusion, a reversal of One
Hundred Years of Solitude?

Yes, because at the end it is about human solidarity. This is the last word, I would say, of this
novel. What I am particularly proud of with this novel (which I see now like someone else’s
novel because so much time has passed since I wrote it – in four and a half or five years, if I
remember well) is its construction. I think Solenoid is one of the best-built stories that I’ve
ever done, together with the short story “REM” from my first book of prose, Nostalgia. While
“REM” was a long short story of over 150 pages with a very subtle construction, I would say
that Solenoid is like a rocket with several stages.

The first one is a book that could have been published completely separate. Before thinking of
Solenoid, I had another idea: to write about my anomalies. So the first 200 or 250 pages could
have been published as another book called “My Anomalies”. In this part, I was mostly
preoccupied by some things that have really happened to me and made me very nervous for
many years, for my whole life actually, mainly in specific and very particular states of my
mind, mainly in dreams. Some of my dreams were recurring dreams that kept coming my
entire life. Other ones were lucid dreams that I could control. Other ones were absolutely
fantastic and very coherent dreams.

Because I’ve been writing a journal since I was seventeen years old, I've written down almost
all the dreams that I had during my lifetime. That means I can study them, I can classify them,
I can find out what kind of dream appeared in my life at which stage of my life. Some of them
were very powerful and constantly recurring between when I was fifteen and when I was
twenty-five, some others after the age of twenty-five and so on. But some of them, three or
four of them, were absolutely stunning for me. They actually determined some of my books. I
use these dreams, which I have really dreamt, as skeletons for some of my writings. Many
other anomalies of mine also figure. For example, what I called “my visitors” – the people
who appear at night in my character’s bedroom – could be seen for ten seconds, for instance,
as very normal, very natural and real people, and then they dissipated. There are many other
things that have sometimes made me feel special, feel different from other people. I've tried to
hoard a lot of experiences of this kind – strange, fantastic, dream-like, oneiric experiences.

So, while writing this part of the book, I didn’t have the idea of writing a novel yet. I was
writing a sort of a study, a study of a clinical case, let’s say. But step by step, I kind of began
to understand what these dreams were all about, what they signified, why I felt that they were
so important for me. And I discovered that, actually, I was writing only the first stage of a
bigger book, the stage where the fuel is, where the indistinct mass of matter was gathered for
giving fuel and power to the other part of the novel, which I only started to write. At a certain
moment, I understood that it was only the stem of my book and that after the stem some
branches should follow.

At the point where the branches will go in all directions, there's this parable about a burning
house. You can only save one thing from the house, where you have a little baby and a
masterpiece, a fantastic painting, a classical painting like Vermeer’s or Rembrandt’s, a
masterpiece without a price. So what would you do? What would you save, the baby or the
wonderful work of art? When I wrote this part of my book – it was a dialogue between two
characters in a school, two teachers – I myself didn’t know what I should answer. What would
I do myself? I wasn’t sure. And I let them decide.

To my surprise, to my very big surprise, my character chooses the baby all the time. His lover,
a teacher of physics, plays the devil’s advocate and tries to break her friend’s argument. She
says: “Okay, you saved the child, but what would you do if you knew that this child would
become Adolf Hitler?” And he says, to my surprise, without preconception: “I would still
choose the child.” “But what if you knew that that child would become a serial murderer, who
brings a lot of pain into the world, a lot of tragedy?” And my character says: “I would still
choose the baby.”
Here I gave an answer to some other scenes of this kind in world literature. First there's
Fyodor Dostoevsky, who, in his huge novel The Brothers Karamazov, wrote that scene with
the Great Inquisitor. One of the characters, Alyosha, says that he cannot understand evil. If
everybody would be happy and only one child be killed or tortured because of it, he couldn’t
bear this, he would think the world was monstrous. The same thing happens to Hans Castorp
in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Castorp has a dream in the snow at that hospital
for tuberculosis on the mountain. He dreams of a temple where everybody is very happy, but
under it a child is being murdered. This was some kind of compensation, out of a continuous
fight between good and evil.

This topic reflects one of the most important questions in the world: Unde malum? Where
does evil come from? It’s the most important philosophical and theological question. I try to
answer it myself in Solenoid, which, in a way, is an ambitious novel about human fate. The
choice of my character is absolutely important in the novel, because it guides my character
towards the end, where he decides that redemption should be for everybody, not only for
some, not only for the good people, but for absolutely everybody. Until everybody is saved
you do not have permission to save yourself.

Interesting, that sheds a totally new light on the novel. As with Blinding, the novel reads
like an ambiguous love letter to Romania’s capital, Bucharest. Would you say you feel
less drawn to a contemporary Bucharest than to an earlier but lost version of it?

When I was a young writer, I was jealous of the writers who had their own cities. Of Jorge
Luis Borges who had Buenos Aires and always wrote about this fabulous city. Of Fyodor
Dostoevsky who had Saint Petersburg. Of Lawrence Durrell who had Alexandria. Of course
James Joyce invented, in a way, a fabulous Dublin. I had in mind, by writing, to appropriate
my own city. If I couldn’t find an interesting real city, I should invent it. So in a way I
recreated Bucharest, and in another way I invented it. If you come to Bucharest, you will very
soon realize that it has little to do with its image in my novels. I’ve invented much of it. I tried
to create a coherent image of, as I call it in my novel, “the saddest city in the world”, a city
full of ruins, a city full of images of an old glory which is not anymore. I made Bucharest in
my own image, in my own personality. I tried to transform it into some sort of alter ego or a
twin brother. I projected myself on the very eclectic architecture of this city, which has
several layers of history and architecture.

In this book, there's a so-called architect of the city, who decides to build it from scratch. I
had this idea that Bucharest should be put down and rebuilt from scratch, by an architect who
is the opposite from the one who built Brasília, for example, also a city built from scratch, by
a great architect. The opposite because he decides to make a city already in ruins, already
ruined, as if hundreds of years had passed over it. He says that the real interesting cities are
the ruined ones because they are like human destiny, because time destroys everyone, because
each and every human endeavor will end in nothingness. In the same way that children are
very happy to play in the mud, human beings feel at large in ruins.

It’s interesting that, when I was in Bruxelles, me and another writer were asked what paradise
looked like for us. I said that my idea of paradise is a huge planet full of ruins – no
inhabitants, but only houses, millions of houses in ruins. I would love to explore all of them,
to get inside, to see the destroyed furniture, to see the bathrooms and the kitchens in ruins, to
see everything covered with algae, with spider webs. Being able to explore this field of ruins
would be, for me, fascinating and wonderful.
So Bucharest, it’s not at all a real city in my books. Actually, it’s different in each book –
each book draws another image of Bucharest. It’s a state of mind and it’s a metaphor, a
metaphor for my inner life.

Speaking of metaphors, you often characterize the human condition as louse-like or

mite-like, as the experience of a small insect or parasite. Is this more than a metaphor?
Do humans and mites have a fundamentally similar experience?

I have always been fascinated with insects, like Vladimir Nabokov himself. When I was in
Harvard, I could visit his cabinet. He stayed there for seven years, not as a professor of
literature but as an entomologist dealing with butterflies. This was his specialty as a biologist.
I saw thousands of butterflies prepared by Nabokov, many of them having the names of his
characters. There was a butterfly called Lolita, another one Humbert Humbert, and so on.
Insects play a very important role in my novels for no other reason than that I'm fascinated
with them.

In my trilogy Orbitor the butterfly is the most important of them. Even its structure is in the
shape of a butterfly – the right wing, the left wing and the body in the middle. It’s a huge
butterfly, which I sometimes call "flying cathedral", some other times "a mystical butterfly".
In Solenoid, which deals much more with the problem of evil, I chose as an insect the insect
of the insects: mites, insects that cannot even be seen with our eyes. Still they are very real.
They are interesting in their monstrosity, if you look at them under the microscope. And they
cause a lot of diseases, like asthma and many others. If you consider that about a quarter of
the weight of your pillow is made out of their bodies, it becomes very frightening.

In Solenoid, using a science fiction device, the main character is sent to the world of mites. He
becomes a sort of a messiah for the mites, a Jesus Christ, who finds himself in a very, very
small and insignificant world, trying to save it, trying to bring them resurrection. But he’s
killed, like Jesus Christ was killed, because of the misunderstanding between two
civilizations, two ways of living where there is no bridge possible (you cannot communicate
with God, like a cat cannot communicate with you, for example). These are very different
worlds and the problem here is the impossibility to communicate. Also the spider, of course,
is very important for me, because if the butterfly is an angel, the spider is a devil. At exactly
the middle of my trilogy, there is a fight between a tarantula and a big and beautiful butterfly
in a terrarium.

Orbitor’s triptych-like structure is itself named after the composition of a butterfly (the
original Romanian titles are “The Left Wing”, “The Body”, and “The Right Wing”).
Why did not all your foreign publishers retain that structure in their respective titles?

It’s kind of a funny situation, because I think Orbitor is translated into most of the important
languages and in some of the less important languages, let’s say, although all languages are
important. The strategy of my publishers was very different from country to country, from
language to language. For example, my French publisher, Éditions Denoël, decided to
consider the three novels as absolutely separate novels, without any hint that it’s a trilogy. So
they published it as three separate novels with fantasy titles. They never asked me if I agreed
with it and I was rather upset with how they treated my book. The titles had no real
connection to what happened in those novels.

Other publishers decided to use my Romanian name, "Orbitor", which is very different from
the English “orbiter”, because “orbitor” in Romanian means “a mystical light”, or “the Tabor
Light”, the light that Saint Paul meets on the way to Damascus when he's struck by an
illumination from the skies. It’s the light of truth, the light of revelation. Some translators
decided in a way, some others in another way, but I think “blinding” or “abbacinante” in
Italian reflect better what I meant by this title. In Romanian, it’s very beautiful by the way,
because "or-bit-or" is “or” at the margins, which means “gold” in French, and “bit” in the
middle, which makes me think of a microchip, surrounded by golden threads.

What we really admired about Solenoid, is how it succeeds in blending a so-called “novel
of ideas” with a novel that is driven by sensory impressions. Do the big, metaphysical
ideas come to you the same way as the sensory impressions? Is it the same way of
writing or is it a different process?

Now we've arrived at the problem of how I write and this is, in my opinion, very interesting,
because I don’t know any other writer who does that. I write by hand, without any plan,
without synopsis. My way of writing is pure and continuous inspiration. Let’s say, today I’m
in the middle of a novel and I have to write one page or two like every day. What I do is, I
read the page I wrote on the previous day and I try to write in the same key, like a musician.
On each and every page I have the chance to change everything, to change the meaning and
the course of the novel.

It’s madness to write like that, without knowing what you’re going to put on the next page.
It’s like using a 3D printer to make a car, not by assembling all its parts, but by making the
lights at the front of the car first, then the windscreen, then the chairs, then the engine,
everything till the end of the car, so making everything at once. I have to have enormous faith
in what my mind can do, because otherwise you cannot write like this. It’s writing like a poet,
not like a prose writer.

Of course, when you write this way you can fail very, very easily, because on each and every
page you have to decide your book’s trajectory. It’s as if there are crossroads everywhere, all
demanding a decision. But here is the trick: it’s not you who decides but your mind. Your
mind knows better than you do what it is going to do and where it wants to go. It’s like a
horse running a race: the jockey doesn’t win the race – the race is won by the horse. The
jockey should be very small, very light and should only touch the horse in very few places.
The ideal would be that the jockey doesn’t touch the horse at all, that he just flies above it. It’s
your horse, your mind, that wins the race, not you. You are the very small person that guides
the horse, nothing else.

So, I usually let my mind work. I do not touch my book, but let it flow in every direction,
wherever it wants to go. I’m only the portal, the medium, nothing but the voice of someone
inside, and it is this person who actually dictates this book. Sometimes it feels as if the text is
already written on the page and I only wipe out the white stripes that cover the words. I just
erase them and let the text appear.

Do you create your prose and your poetry in the same way? We're particularly
interested in hearing about your work Levantul, one long poem about the history of
Romanian poetry and which you have described as untranslatable.

You might remember a certain episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses that’s called “The Oxen of
the Sun”. It takes place in a maternity ward and some medicine students are talking, eating
sardines, while in the other room a woman is giving birth to a child. Joyce decided to use all
the stages of the English language in this chapter, from the first ecclesiastical books to the
slang of the people in the Bronx or Harlem in his own time. Levantul is quite the same. It is an
Alexandrine poem of 7,000 verses, two hundred pages of nothing but poetry, which
reconstructs the whole history of Romanian poetry, starting from seventeenth century poets,
up until the present day. This is why this book is actually untranslatable. You cannot translate
it for people who have no idea about Romanian poetry and its history.

It’s one of my very best books, maybe the best thing that I ever wrote. In my country it’s a
classic, it’s in the schoolbooks. But I have always been very sad about the untranslatability of
this book, so at a certain moment I decided to do something quite crazy: to translate this it into
Romanian, myself, because many people in Romania can’t read it – it’s written in the
language of old poetry. So I re-translated it into contemporary Romanian, letting out the
frequent quotations and literary allusions, and keeping only the plot and stories. In the prose
version of The Levant, I kept only the adventures, the many interesting stories that appeared in
the text, love stories, stories with pirates… Everything in an ironic, sarcastic and humoristic
trend.

I gave this version of The Levant to all my translators and I asked them: “Can you do this
book in your language?” And four of them answered: “Yes. It’s worth trying, at least.” And
they started to work and they were very happy to be challenged like that and they recreated
their own “Levant”, not only in their own language, but in their own culture, their own
literature, the history of their own poetry. So now we have a version in Spanish, one in
French, one in Swedish and one in Italian. All of them are very different. It’s like translating
mutatis mutandis, it’s like translating Finnegan’s Wake. If you translate it in ten languages,
you’ll have ten new books, because that book is untranslatable.

We’ll have to go for the French version then.

It’s a very nice version, the French one.

Or maybe push your friend Jan Willem Bos to translate it into Dutch. Try harder, Jan
Willem!

M: He will be happy to, but the problem for Dutch and other languages too, is that it’s hard to
find a publisher. It’s hard to find a publisher for books that are pure art and are not
commercial. They do not guarantee to sell very well, and so on. I always had this problem in
The Netherlands, but luckily one of the best publishers there, De Bezige Bij, had the courage
to publish two of my very big and, from a commercial point of view, very risky books. I’m
extremely grateful to them.

From the very start your work has been subjected to external alterations. Wasn’t it the
Ceausescu regime that originally forced you to change the title of Nostalgia to “The
Dream”?

Well, it would have been very nice if only my title had been changed, but actually…
Nostalgia came out in 1989, when we were still in a dictatorship in my country. There were
four months left until the Romanian Revolution happened. Being in a dictatorship, there was
an official censorship, so my book had to be censored, or rather, had to be mutilated by the
censorship. It was published with one of the five original stories eliminated from the book,
and with many other excerpts, tens of pages, eliminated from the other stories that remained
in the book.
Which story was left out, was it “The Architect”?

It was “The Architect”, you are right. And this happened because the censors were very
sensitive about all the things that from their view could be seen as allusions to the president,
to the political life and so on. Since by that time Ceaușescu was destroying villages all across
Romania, he was ironically called “the architect”. Hence my eponymous story was
eliminated. The title of the book has an interesting story as well. The original title was indeed
“Nostalgia” (later issues would re-instate both this title and the banned story “The
Architect”, red.), but in 1989 they changed this into “The Dream” because by that time the
great Russian movie director Andrey Tarkovsky had just defected to Italy, where he made his
first movie while he was abroad, Nostalghia (1983). And because this film was banned in my
country, like in Russia, like in many other countries from the east, I couldn’t use this title. So
they forced me to accept another title that I didn’t want to have. There were recurring
instances of this kind of monstrous habit of censoring books by that time.

What explains your interest in science? Have we lost a great scientist to a great writer?

I always thought that being a writer is being not only a person who writes about love triangles
or global warming, but it means that you should be a complete person. You should be
somebody who cares about himself or herself and at the same time about the whole world
around us. I think it’s about an inborn curiosity. I’m a curious person. I don’t just read
literature, like many writers do. I read everything. And I don’t only read, I watch TV,
YouTube, all of these viewing platforms. I watch everything I’m interested in and I’m
interested in everything. Half of what I read is science, from mathematics to quantum physics,
to biology, to medicine, to embryology – each and every field within my reach.

My publisher in Bucharest has a very good collection of scientific books, absolutely

wonderful, and what I buy from my own publisher are not so much books of literature, but
books of science. In the last years I’m more and more interested in philosophy. It’s my new
and very burning passion, because I discovered that in order to be able to write – even novels,
short stories or poems – you should have some philosophical training. Now I’m very eager to
read very difficult books, about the history of philosophy. I’m reading Kant and Descartes
with much pleasure and I feel greatly enriched by their work. I read books from all fields,
some of them not very easy to read. I read books of mathematics, for example, though I
cannot decipher an equation. I’m very interested in the history of mathematics, the
personalities, Georg Cantor’s work… I’m an omnivorous reader.

In Solenoid, there’s this sect that protests death and everything else that’s bad about life.
Did you think about anti-natalism and its prime Romanian proponent Emil Cioran
when writing about them?

Of course, I read some books of Cioran, as he published his first books in Romanian. But I’m
not very fond of him because of his political past. I totally disagree with his political ideas,
which were right-wing, extremist, fascist ideas. This is why I am suspicious of everything he
wrote. He was a very good writer, before being a very good philosopher, in my opinion. His
works are absolutely wonderful as pieces of esthetic experience, but not of political or
ideological experiences. He was a cynical writer. He was a sort of a new Schopenhauer, who
actually was the exact opposite of what he argued for in his philosophy – he was a gourmand,
a womanizer, or as we say, “he was burning the candle on both sides.” It’s quite the same with
Cioran. He was the philosopher who was talking all the time about suicide, but he had no
intention to suicide himself, it was all pure fancy.
My picketers, the people who protest death, madness, every evil of the human race, no, they
have no connection to anything. I just invented them. I started from Dylan Thomas’ poem
“Do not go gentle into that good night”, which is the most important protest against death that
I know. Starting from that and some texts I found in Herodotos, I started to imagine a group
of people who do not protest against war, against economic issues, but against the
fundamental evils of our race, of our species: death, madness, diseases, and so on.

A very interesting thing is that now my characters really exist. Literature has changed life in a
way. In Latin America – Colombia, Mexico and other countries – after I published Solenoid in
Spanish, those piquetistas, as they call themselves, just appeared. Now they are a sort of a
group that do the same thing that my characters do in my novel. They have big signs and go in
front of the hospitals where cancer patients have died, in front of the morgues, and so on. So
in a way, my novel – and I’m very astonished about it – created a new reality, which didn’t
exist before it.

We’ve read on your Facebook wall that these piquetistas were present at one of your
events and that the police had to be involved?

Yes, I don’t want to show off, but this really happened. When I had a reading in Colombia – it
was like Beatlemania – the people just started to crowd me from all directions and I couldn’t
breathe anymore. It was very scary for me but the people who were ensuring order there
surrounded me and we started to run through the crowd to the exit of the book fair, about four
hundred meters. We ran and a crowd of readers followed us. They all shouted: “Hey Mircea,
we are here! Give us autographs! Sign our books!” I was about to die there, killed by my own
readers. It was a very interesting but also scary episode, but I survived (laughs). I have now
made preparations to go to Mexico, as I have just received a big price there (Premio Fil de
Literatura, red.). I just love Latin America, all of my visitors are enthusiastic for me.

We’ve noticed that you’ve just finished another book, “Theodoros”. We already know a
little bit about it. It’s going to be a long book again. Can you tell us something? How did
it turn out? Are you glad with it? What do you still have to do?

I’ve just started rereading it, which I still have to do as I’ve finished it a few days ago. I will
say that I’m satisfied with this book, which is a pseudo-historical book. It takes place in the
nineteenth century and it’s about the life of a person who, being a simple servant at the court
of a small aristocrat in Romania, has had from a very early age this dream of becoming an
emperor. As a child, all his games with other children were already marked by this dream, as
he always played the role of an emperor and the other kids were his subjects. All his life,
everything he did, he wanted to go reach higher and higher, to grow more and more. He even
commits all kinds of evil things, robberies, piracy, and so on. None of this bothered him as he
went on with this very intense wish that he had. Finally he succeeds and he becomes the
emperor of Ethiopia in Africa. So it’s a sort of a picaresque novel with the fantastic and
fabulous life of a character. It’s a work of imagination. It’s very different from either Orbitor
or Solenoid. I would say that it is my “real” novel. It is my first novel that is really a novel,
not a poem, not a metaphysical treatise and so on.

In Solenoid the narrator also says that he is writing an “anti-book.” Is that what your
previous works were, “anti-novels”?

(slight hesitation) Yes, in a way. But this one, that I have just finished and in a way am still
finishing, is a real novel. It’s not an anti-novel. At the same time it also has a kind of
relativism in itself, so it is also a kind of postmodern novel, full of irony and this distance,
distances.

To go back to the notion of anti-novel and Solenoid’s narrator’s preoccupation with

Kafka, I'd like to finish up with this tiny passage about Hermana and Issachar (ADD).
The narrator says this is the best thing Kafka ever did, because he didn’t turn it into a
story. Do you agree with the narrator in that respect? Is that the greatest achievement of
literature, when it refuses to become “literature”?

You are now talking about Franz Kafka. One of the most interesting things in discussing his
work is that he wasn’t actually writing his diary, his journal, his short stories, his parables, his
novels even, separately. He didn’t write his novels in a certain notebook and his short stories
in another one, he wrote all of them in the notebooks where he wrote his journal. So
everything that he did was only one manuscript! He wrote a very long manuscript, including
his novels, including his short stories, including his parables and so on, and integrating
everything into his journal, his diary.

We find there very short… let’s say stories, nuclei of stories. We have descriptions of dreams.
We have parables that came to his mind and which were not finished. Sometimes he started to
write again and again on each of them. So he didn’t want to produce books. He was only
interested in the act of writing, in the process of writing. So this episode with Hermana and
many other episodes are in my opinion masterpieces in themselves. Even if you cannot say
that they are real stories or real poems etc. But they are extraordinary insights in the soul of
himself, in his own absolutely dark and fantastic inside.

In that case, thank you, Mr. Cartarescu, for this extraordinary voyage inside your dark
and fantastic skull. Now, Jan Willem and Sean Cotter, let's get cracking!