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The machine that weaves the imagination

2022-12-06T11:04:02.267Z


The Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu has received the FIL Prize for Literature for his work full of elements as fantastic as realistic


Mircea Cartarescu has received the prize for Literature in Romance Languages ​​from the Guadalajara International Book Fair, and I had to talk about his work at the ceremony:

In the impetuous torrent of that meticulous prose, one dream replaces another and the real world leads through an unforeseen shortcut to another unreal one and the two are then nothing but parallel images that open up in infinite correspondences, because a universe contains the previous one and will contain the following one, and the dimension of the page is nothing but the reflection of another one that escapes through the margins.

A single book that is written incessantly, made up of different novels, because it is about the same cosmos that after the original explosion will always be expanding infinitely without ever finding its limits, the hallucinating and hallucinating work of a writer who is time written by another, and who contemplates the world inscribed on the shaven skull of a woman, and then knows that, "from a height that cannot be calculated in miles or parsecs, someone, leaning over the gigantic skull of another woman, also contemplated him, embedded in his little world, and so on to infinity, upwards and downwards, on a scale of a terrifying magnitude.

A dream that, as in Borges' labyrinths, contains another dream, which at the same time is found in another dream, where, also, a man has the project of dreaming another man, and ends up discovering that he himself is also the image of another dream

In Mircea's visions, the macrocosm contains and replicates the microcosm as in the paintings of El Bosco, where the hallucinating becomes ordinary, or in those of Remedios Varo, a forest of columns in an uninhabited city covered by a hard and transparent dome, cities into whose squares and streets we end up under a light of sulfur and phosphate, oppressive in their mystery and melancholy like those of De Chirico, solitary statues and arcades that are lost in the distance, or, like those of Escher's engravings, obsessive stairs that ascend to nowhere

.

The door in the wall

of HG Wells, which opens for the child that "leads to immortal realities", a splendid garden where two panthers, enormous and velvety, play with a ball.

But through that door, Mircea's child enters a different world, where he discovers underground passages, secret chambers.

The fantastic weighing on the membrane of reality until it becomes deformed.

And in the basement what is found are the machines that weave reality: “when a leaf fell from a tree, those black and greasy machinery, with a lot of jagged tongues, pinions, levers, Maltese crosses and zippers, with lenses bulges and finger-thin pistons, they redid it right away.”

And, as in Borges, we are always the other, we want to be the other, to enter into its own mystery: "When contemplating a passerby on the street, a biological organism wrapped in cloth", says the narrator, "I have often wanted to undress , in a desperate violation, his true face, stripping it of the cellular agglomerations: the skin of the face, the eyes, the skull and the jaws, brutally opening the cerebral hemispheres to find there… the memory of his first day of school” .

In that verbal warp composed of threads of biology, microbiology, genetics, physiology, anatomy, cosmography, quantum physics, we will always be descending towards hell, and when we touch reality we find ourselves in a museum of magnified microbes where we contemplate inside an urn a the couple of Nicolae Ceaucescu and Elena Petrescu, comical and sinister.

And the scarecrows, husband and wife, touching reality turn it to stone, cover it with blood.

“Forty thousand dead in Timisoara.

Wagonloads of the dead, naked and bound with barbed wire, with marks of savage torture, arriving in Bucharest to be cremated.

And ordinary people, like ants on tree trunks, blind to anything more than an inch from their hard black bodies.”

The yellow train that takes to dump the workers murdered in the banana strike in

One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“The new pharaoh”, who “ruled time, eclipses and the alignment of the planets, sent the rains at the right time and exponentially increased the fertility of the country through which milk and honey flowed on TV…”

And the satrap meanwhile deserves portraits of a “Renaissance maiden, happily running through a field enameled with violets, hand in hand with an athletic young man, in a turtleneck sweater, neither more nor less than the comrade General Secretary of the Party, Supreme Commander of the Army, head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, chief rabbi of the Jewish community, general architect of the capital, supreme master of the Masonic Lodge, the first miner, farmer, engineer, poet, metallurgist, merceologist, meteorologist, and urologist in the country .”.

The Romanian revolution then appears on the streets, and it is "a young woman ten meters tall, with her bare breasts visible through the cotton blouse over which hung a necklace of Austrian ducats and with her hips wrapped in a silk skirt." raw silk…”.

Calling this literature fantastic, or calling it science fiction would be too banal.

What is breathed in it is “the harsh perfume of fiction”.

A ball of universes embedded in their connecting rods, which never stop turning.

Sergio Ramírez

is a writer and winner of the Cervantes Prize.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-06

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