Mircea Cărtărescu dreamed the night before that he was walking with his son through an unknown city.
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 store was closed”, narrates the Romanian writer.
The child then began to cry and a person appeared from inside who took the key and placed it on the door.
“Don't worry, we'll figure it out,” the father said.
“I grabbed the key and opened the door, and entered the store full of toys with my son,” continues the author.
This morning Cărtărescu woke up in a hotel room where he was staying during the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL).
Mircea Cărtărescu this Tuesday at FIL.
Roberto Antillon
The dream will go to the author's diary, a 17-year-old handwritten journal.
"It is another dream of the hundreds of dreams that I have written in 49 years," says the author.
Many are material for his literature, “an overflowing prose that combines fantastic and realistic elements”, as defined by the jury that awarded him the FIL Literature Award a few days ago.
For his book
De él Solenoid
, for example, he transcribed between 30 and 40 of those dreams.
"Dreams give us an immense gift," says the author, and explains: "We put dreams aside and believe that reality is everyday life, but at night we live a parallel life."
In the
lobby
of the hotel where Cărtărescu is staying, Elena Poniatowska looks for her suitcase;
Jorge Volpi appears by the elevator;
Irene Vallejo is detained to take photos of her;
Rosa Montero returns from breakfast and behind her comes Leonardo Padura in sandals.
The Romanian author comes down from his room with his wife, the Romanian writer Ioana Nicolaie.
He awaits them for an intense three-hour interview session in a carpeted and freezing room of the hotel.
Cărtărescu sits without leaning back, clasps his hands between his knees and, slightly hunched over, answers each of the questions generously.
“I am a very modest person.
I am not proud of having written any of my books, ”he answers a journalist who asks him about his best book.
The Romanian language sounds like Italian.
Critics said that
Solenoid,
published in Spanish in 2017, is his masterpiece.
Cărtărescu, however, compares the process of writing each of his books to “giving birth”: “I think I was made for that, there is no reason to be proud, just very grateful”.
His work in Spanish is published by Impedimenta publishing house and includes ten titles translated by Marian Ochoa de Eribe, who interprets his response in Spanish when the interviews are not in English.
The day before, while they were touring the venue where FIL is held in Guadalajara, a young man stopped them to tell them that Cărtărescu's literature had saved his life;
he rolled up his shirt sleeves and showed them a house that floats without a floor tattooed on his skin, the illustration on the cover of
Solenoid
.
“That is one of the happiest moments a writer can have, not the Nobel Prize,” says Cărtărescu.
This Monday there was a display of similar devotion.
A young woman and her husband approached him with a two-month-old baby in their arms, and Cărtărescu fell silent.
"His name is Mircea," the woman told him.
The name – it is pronounced something like
mircha
– was in honor of his grandfather, but also of him.
Mircea Cărtărescu chats with supporters outside the fairgrounds.
Roberto Antillon
The shirt that Cărtărescu is wearing is printed with red butterflies.
"The most graceful of all creatures," says the writer.
His trilogy
De él Cegador
is, precisely, a book “in the form 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 in a chrysalis and resurrects as a beautiful butterfly.
Seeing its metamorphosis, human beings make a comparison with our destiny”, he explains, adding: “It is a symbol of immortality, an image of the human soul”.
"Anything you want to add?" asks the last journalist who interviews him.
"Just a glass of water, please."
Cărtărescu has an easy face to recognize in the halls of FIL.
His fine hair grows deep on his skull at the level of his left eye and falls to the right in a close wave on his forehead.
He is surprised to see a whole wall full of his work.
His gaze is restless, like the buzz of a bee, and when he speaks his upper lip remains fixed.
He has a hard time moving down the aisles without being asked for a photo or an autograph.
He is one of the most important writers of his generation – he won the Formentor Prize in 2018;
For years there has been speculation that he could receive the Nobel Prize – and today he looks tired.
But the exhaustion disappears when he enters the room where more than a thousand young people applaud him.
Cărtărescu greets them by shaking his stiff hands at head height, palms facing forward.
“I don't think they know much about Romania, the poorest country in Europe,” Cărtărescu told the young people.
"What makes us similar," he said, "is more than what separates us."
Inequality, the “horrible dictatorships” of Romania – “three fascists and one communist” – and of 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 when he was a long-haired young man belonging to the
blue jeans generation
.
He told them about his first novel, which he wrote at the age of nine, and it made them laugh: “Jack and Jim were going into the woods and found a mysterious cabin.
The cabin was made of wood... And I didn't know what to say anymore because I didn't know how to describe the cabin.
In the end, I drew it and solved the problem”.
Although Cărtărescu is a storyteller, essayist and literary critic, he considers himself above all a poet.
After the age of 30, however, he decided not to compose any more verses.
"I had the feeling that enough was enough, that he was going to continue to imitate me."
But when the covid-19 health emergency began, he began to write "like crazy, 20 poems a day."
He published them in a "poor" book that has not been translated into Spanish.
“I felt the need, I don't know why, but it saved my life.
Because I had suicidal thoughts all the time, ”he had told a journalist hours before.
He does not believe that he has broken the promise that he has kept for three decades: "I did not 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,” Cărtărescu said.
Days before, upon receiving the FIL Award, he had made a defense of the literary genre in 15 minutes.
"Poetry is not entertainment and the poet is not, as so many still think, a misfit with his head in the clouds," he had pronounced.
"Poetry," he continued this Monday, "is not about writing poems, it is a way of looking."
“Each and every child is a poet, but then we lose it.
If at 17 you still see the beauty of the world, you are a poet.
I'm very proud that I didn't grow up."
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