”I never wanted to become a writer. Actually, I never wanted to become anything.” Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu shares his thoughts on writing, growing up in a Communist regime and Franz Kafka.
“When I write, I feel a sort of split in my personality,” Mircea Cărtărescu says and elaborates: “For me, writing is not concerning my personality, but a second one, which emerges from the moment I sit down and start writing.” Cărtărescu’s process includes writing with pen and paper – and never with any plan: “This is how I have always written, and I think because of that, literature is a thing of faith.”
Mircea Cărtărescu grew up in Bucharest, Romania, in the 1960s, which he describes as a “strange mixture of modernity and tradition.” He didn’t grow up in a household full of books, but he still praises, especially his mother, for being a huge influence. She was a big dreamer and would tell her “fantastic, strange, colourful dreams” to him and his siblings every morning. “I think I inherited this ability to dream a lot from my mother.” In the neighbourhood he grew up in, there was a library around the corner, which he describes as a “honeypot”, where he would read everything from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Virginia Woolf.
Being a writer in Romania under the communist regime then was a challenge. “I was lucky to find my college and after that in my faculty group of writers, who wanted to preserve the tradition of free literature,” he says and continues: “We preserved, in a way, the inner freedom of our traditions, of our culture and of our people. The Romanians needed us, needed their artists.” When communism fell, Cărtărescu’s work was translated, and ‘Solenoid’ became his literary breakthrough internationally.
Franz Kafka has played a significant role in Mircea Cărtărescu’s authorship. “Everybody keeps telling me: ‘Don’t talk about Kafka anymore because everybody talks about Kafka.’ And I answer: ‘Well, I’m not talking about Kafka. I’m talking about MY Kafka.’ I have the greatest respect for his work, just because Kafka wasn’t a writer. He never called himself a writer,” Cărtărescu explains and continues: “He went beyond our power of seeing. Beyond what our senses tell us, what our language tell us.”
Mircea Cărtărescu (b. 1956) is a prominent Romanian writer known for his surreal, introspective works that blend fiction, poetry, and autobiography. His most famous books include the series Blinding (1996-2007), Nostalgia (1989), Solenoid (2015), and Melancholy (2019). Cărtărescu has won multiple awards, such as the Dublin Literary Award, and is widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary voices in Eastern European literature.
Mircea Cărtărescu was interviewed by Jørgen Herman Monrad in connection to Louisiana Literature at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, in August 2024.
Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edit: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024
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