LatinosUSA

A short story – Poetry – Bookshelf – Essays – Hotel of the Broken Hearts – Interviews – Contact- English Edition

LatinosUSA Editors: J. Ré Crivello, Nolcha Fox, Michelle Ayón Navajas, Francisco Bravo, Robbie Cheadle
Masticadores -en español / LatinosUsa —Click to read in Spanish
A Short Story

“The Divine Epilepsy We Call Inspiration”: A Conversation with Mircea Cărtărescu

by Claudia Cavallin

IPhoto of Mircea Cărtărescu courtesy of Deep Vellum

In the world we live in, there are things that happen and things that should have occurred according to the simplest and most basic systems of natural evolution. As we see with insects or even cities, in the works of Mircea Cărtărescu (b. 1956, Bucharest), everything is born, evolves, is built, destroyed, and rebuilt. Each book weaves together stories narrated from the personal to the most extraordinary linguistic and poetic efforts that combine the timeless connections of dialects, poetry, and dreams where several bodies are combined. Always considered one of the most relevant candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Cărtărescu remains humble no matter what prize he wins. His real reward has been the profound recognition of his work, translated into twenty-three languages, and shared by the reconstruction of multiple identities, in the liminal space of a story full of alternations. Whether in the words on his pages or the images he shares with his readers on social media, everything mobile builds an unstoppable bridge to his readers.

Claudia Cavallin: The Blinding trilogy transforms life into a journey, into a flutter on the road. Is your life experience like an insect’s movement that never stops, constantly reborn and dying?

Mircea Cărtărescu: To be honest, dear Claudia, I kind of forgot Blinding. It is such an old book of mine. Sometimes I think I wrote it in a previous life, when I lived in another house, with another woman, and certainly in another body, for we change completely every seven years. Consequently, not a single atom in my actual body participated in the writing of that novel. Besides, I never reread my books, I forget them on purpose, just as I try to forget how I look every night, to surprise myself in the morning when I look in the mirror. 

Insects—mainly butterflies—are the true symbol of our souls and fate in this world, not only because of their beauty, strangeness, and fragility but because of their metamorphosis. This is the most fascinating thing, the radical change they suffer: from a caterpillar, basically a worm, to the miracle of the butterfly. Our fate and dreams are the same. We live our lives on Earth as hairy, egotistic, and voracious caterpillars, but we dream that in our next life, freeing ourselves from the chrysalid of our coffin, we will emerge as winged, wonderful, colorful, gracious butterflies. One of my best stories ever, included in my book called Melancolia (not translated into Spanish yet), is based on the concept of metamorphosis. There I describe a world in which men drop their skins every five years, like locusts, while women suffer the other type of metamorphosis, closing themselves in a chrysalid once in their lifetime, when they are young girls, and becoming magnificent, winged creatures. 

I love insects, as many other artists did—think of Nabokov, for example—for they are living fables, living symbols of our fate.

I love insects, as many other artists did—think of Nabokov, for example—for they are living fables, living symbols of our fate. In Blinding, I wrote about the eternal war between the spider and the butterfly—our dark and light sides—while in Solenoid I focused on “the insects’ insects,” the mites, invisible creatures which crawl over our bodies day and night. In Solenoid, I imagined a community of mites, living miserable lives in ignorance and obscurity (as we do), believing they are the only living beings in the whole universe (as we think). A Savior is sent to them from our much higher world to bring them the good news that they are not alone in all of Creation, but they kill him, unable to understand his message of peace and kindness.

And, yes, insects are stroboscopic beings, fast alternations of darkness and light, provoking in an artist’s soul the divine epilepsy we call inspiration.

Cavallin: In The Body, you describe an artificial way of our life as neotenic mammals, trying to stay immature for as long as possible, where insect-like humans sleep in a silk cocoon until they are seventeen, when suddenly, in the blink of an eye, they begin to take flight. Can this figure of developmental stages in insects and humans also be projected onto the figure of the city? Do cities and their political contexts also function as bodies that can be destroyed and rebuilt in your novels? 

Cărtărescu: Why not? Cities are also organic. They are living beings. They grow, have mood changes, diseases, symbiotic relationships with their inhabitants, and finally, yes, they can fly. Swift’s Laputa flew, Miyazaki’s city used to fly, and Bucharest, at the end of Solenoid, rises from its place on earth and hovers over the Inferno-like pit full of demons, which it leaves behind.

In my trilogy, Bucharest is of course not only one of the most important places in the universe but is also a very important character, a person—it is myself. My alter ego made of bricks and cement, but also its inhabitants’ nightmares, is present in my poems. Its appearance is never the same in the long row of my books but changes all the time. In my poems, Bucharest is a city of dreams, a sort of a wonderful, high-tech megalopolis, “the most beautiful city in the world.” In Blinding,it already starts to lose its aura, changing “into something rich and strange,” sculptured in my own brain and illuminated by memory; in Solenoid, it is already a ruin, a burnt and degraded city, “the saddest in the world”; finally, in Melancolia, it simply disappears, the city where the stories take place has no name and no feature that could make it recognizable. Here it becomes an imagined city, as in Calvino, full of archetypes, an equivalent of my Jungian subconsciousness.  (Read more World literatury /Claudia Cavallin)

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«A Swing and an Ice-Cold Drink» by Arshein Deticio

Under the faint glow of a playground post,
In a neighborhood so busy in the morning, yet so quiet at night,
I sit on a swing with a makeshift seat out of a worn-out tire,
Barely holding on to rusty chains.
All alone,
Holding my ice-cold drink.

I grew up fearing darkness,
Not knowing that at this point in my life,
It would become my greatest comfort.
Don’t get me wrong—
My heart still beats so fast I can’t breathe,
My hands tremble as I almost spill my drink.
But darkness…
Darkness makes me pause for a moment,
Forces me to find peace within myself,
Allows me to escape the chaos of blinding light.

I never thought I would love the darkness
Until it made me see
That there’s more to fear
When everything is visible—
So clear, yet so confusing,
Leaving you lost, unsure of where you belong,
Wondering why you’re stuck in a life
Where you’re only living just to survive.

Or maybe it wasn’t the darkness.
Maybe it was the ghosts I feared.
But what’s funny is, I realized—
It wasn’t ghosts that would haunt me,
But regrets—
“What ifs” and “could-have-beens,”
The chances I didn’t take,
The people I lost,
The parts of me I outgrew.

I enjoy being alone,
But never being lonely.
I seem pretty brave for a girl so scared,
Pretty burned out for a girl so passionate,
Pretty unmotivated for a girl
With so many dreams.

I yearn for a shoulder to lean on,
Yet I’ve built walls so high—
So hard to reach,
So hard to break.

I want the moon to keep me company,
To hold my secrets.
But sometimes,
I just want to be
One of the stars above.

But for now, I’ll stay here—
Sitting on a swing,
Holding an ice-cold drink.

By MasticadoresHotel

Daily Update from Chewers & MasticadoresUSA
Gobblers / Interviews
MasticadoresCanada Editor: Ray Whitaker (Daily Update)

LatinosUSA

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Masticadores.com and masticadoresdeLetras belong to the NGO Masticadores. We promote culture and communication. We publish in eight languages ​​(Spanish, English, Portuguese, Tagalog, Romanian, Italian, French and Catalan). And we publish in twelve countries (France, Italy, Brazil, USA, Mexico, Argentina, India, Taiwan, France, Turkey, Uruguay, Philippines. On 22 blogs. With 24 editors, and 450 writers.

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LatinosUsa (EnglishEdition)

Founder and editor: J. Re Crivello

Contacto:

Email: fleminglabwork@gmail.com

The Hotel by Masticadores

Editor: Michelle Ayón Navajas

LatinosUSA (en español)

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