Amsterdam Review talks to Mircea Cărtărescu, one of the greatest writers of contemporary fiction, whose singular imagination takes us beyond the realm of literature and into his own dazzling and unsettling world. In his new book Theodoros, forthcoming from Deep Vellum (October 27), he subverts the historical novel with the tale of a servant-turned-emperor who "claimed the world but lost his soul."
Amsterdam Review: I've recently had the pleasure of hearing you tell the story of how your new book, Theodoros, came to be. Can you share this with our readers?
Mircea Cărtărescu: Well, after publishing Solenoid, a hard, metaphysical book about the fate of humanity and the meaning of literature, I decided that my next book would be as different from it as I could imagine. I thought of "a thing of beauty," a sort of Fabergé egg, a work of art as amazing as an illusionist painting on the hemispherical ceiling of a cathedral and as complex as a horologe. I needed plenty of space and time for it, three or four continents and a few thousand years. I also needed special knowledge of mostly everything you can find in encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, painting albums, books of quantum physics, manuals of entomology and topology, books of history, and the Bible itself. I needed the form of a "novel" - but I prefer to call my text "a book" - able to encompass all of those pieces, like a clock where the cog-wheels, the springs, the rubies, etc. work together in harmony.
To do a work like that, I had to find a simple, strong, archetypal story that could sustain the whole mechanism like the central pillar of a carousel. And I remembered that, forty years ago, when I was a young assistant at the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest, I read a very short account by a 19th-century memorialist named Ion Ghica. It was the true story of a young servant, a childhood friend of the memorialist, called Tudor in Romanian and Theodoros in Greek (his mother was Greek). This child was different from all the others who played together at the mansion of Ghica's father, a big boyar, or aristocrat. That child of humble origin had a strong and mad obsession: he knew that someday he would become an emperor. When he played with other children, he was always the emperor and the others were his subjects, whom he punished with cruelty. At the age of 19, Theodoros disappeared from Wallachia, and nobody saw him again.
After several decades, Ion Ghica became Romania's ambassador in London and could study the correspondence between Queen Victoria and the great Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros the Second. And he was amazed: the name was the same, the handwriting was the same, the face of Tewodros on gravures and coins was very similar to Ghica's childhood friend, as he remembered him. Was it possible that a humble Wallachian servant had really become an emperor?
When I first read Ghica's page, I wrote in my journal: "What a story, what a destiny! It is a whole novel here, waiting for its novelist!" And I decided that I would be its novelist sometime. But forty years passed, and I never found the time and disposition to start this different book, unlike any other I wrote. I published lots of books in the meantime, most of them accounts of my very strange inner life, and only in 2020 did I really start the novel, which took me two years to write.
AR: The novel opens in a striking second-person voice, unidentified at first, addressing Theodoros, the main character, at the hour of the final judgment. What did the vocative perspective allow you to do that a first-person narrative wouldn’t?
MC: The narrative approach of Theodoros is very special, unlike most of the novels I know of. First, the point of view does not belong to a human. The story is told by the archangels, who send it to God at the final judgment. God is supposed to read it and decide whether Theodoros' soul goes to heaven or hell. Consequently, the narrative voice is in the second person, because a celestial voice must be an ethical one. The archangels address Theodoros directly from a sort of top-down video-game perspective, scold him for his mistakes and crimes, pity him at times, and maintain an intimate, empathic relationship with him. The shell of the novel is actually theological: heaven and hell take part in the terrestrial action, as in the Odyssey or Dante's Divine Comedy. Within this golden cassette, my character, a picaresque one, travels through several worlds and his experiences and adventures change him a lot during the fifty years of his life on Earth. Step by step, governed by a diabolical ambition, he climbs the social ladder and gets more and more power. To show his hubris, I used the conventions of the historical novel: Theodoros starts as a servant, then becomes a pirate in the Greek archipelago, then a warlord in Ethiopia, and finally fulfills his demented dream of becoming an emperor. I was also interested in the mechanism of power that corrupts the soul: my character finally becomes a bloody tyrant, responsible for thousands of innocent victims. Calling my book a historical novel would still be misleading: I prefer to call it a work of imagination set within a pseudo-historical framework. Although my novel is very well documented, I did not set out to reconstruct historical periods, but simply to construct them.
AR: It’s not giving the book away to say that the novel ends where it begins: at the moment of Theodoros’ death. This, to me, may suggest that a life only becomes clear and comprehensible at its conclusion. Does meaning, for you, exist only retrospectively?
MC: In the first chapter, my character kills himself with the pistol gifted to him by Queen Victoria when they were still friends. I thought it was a fine beginning of a story. Not because Theodoros could see his whole life at the moment of death. Actually, by that time, at the age of 50, his body and mind were destroyed by his life of excesses. The British troops were at his door. He could barely breathe and was semi-conscious. But the narrative voices enter the book from the heavens as a sort of tragic chorus, reviewing a spectacular and violent life (still with drops of tenderness and faith) and announcing the story's further developments.
Otherwise, life is life, in reality and in books: it is meant to be lived and thought of moment by moment, and not to be reviewed at its end.
AR: Theodoros is portrayed as both a historical figure and a mythic archetype. Do you see him as an individual or as a symbol of the human condition, perhaps its obsession with greatness?
MC: Theodoros was of course a real historical character. But I'm not interested in reconstructing lives and epochs. I invented Theodoros from narrative necessities, he is one of the many "translucid" characters in my book. By this I mean that they were historically real, but seemed to be the creation of a delirious writer's mind. Other real characters who are also re-invented or re-interpreted by me are Queen Victoria herself, King Solomon, the queen of Sheba, the ancestors of John Lennon, the giraffe brought from Nubia to France, or the other "emperor" in my book, born the same day as Theodoros, the delusional Abraham Norton who entitled himself the Emperor of the United States of America.
Theodoros is the embodiment of pride and ambition. His models in life are Alexander the Great and Napoleon. His first word as a baby was not mother or father, but "I want." Step by step he becomes a horrific and bloody dictator. Only his ambition is not a usual one, but, as you said, an archetypal one: he wants in fact to replace God on His celestial throne. Theodoros is more than an individual, although his life was rich in real and fantastic facts: he is the embodiment of all tyrants, from those in Antiquity to contemporary ones.
AR: Theodoros’ life comes across as failure and fulfilled prophecy. He achieves his dream, yet loses everything. Is this the central paradox that makes the story a tragedy?
MC: He himself might have seen his life as a tragedy. But who cares what he thought of himself? For the supreme reader, at the end of the book, his life is tragicomic. A mixture of heroism, melodrama, crime, love for his mother and for two or three women, operetta, religious quest, and real doom. Reading the book of his life, written by the archangels, God cries on some pages and laughs on others. Three fundamental values shaped Theodoros' life: power, love, and faith. By chasing the first, he loses the other two. He claims the world, but finally loses his soul.
The most important thing for me was to make my readers understand that Theodoros in my book is not a person in flesh and blood. He cannot be judged or condemned, he doesn't have a psychology of his own. He is just a character, complex and round, but not real. He's the product of my fantasy. I did not intend to write his biography, nor to write a historical novel. If you want it, Theodoros is not about Theodoros, but about the historical novel. This makes it, as I said, a pseudo-historical, or better said, a meta-historical novel. During the 600 pages of the book I did my best to undermine the idea of a real history by using, for example, anachronisms and other methods to explode the book's diachrony.
Amsterdam Review: I've recently had the pleasure of hearing you tell the story of how your new book, Theodoros, came to be. Can you share this with our readers?
Mircea Cărtărescu: Well, after publishing Solenoid, a hard, metaphysical book about the fate of humanity and the meaning of literature, I decided that my next book would be as different from it as I could imagine. I thought of "a thing of beauty," a sort of Fabergé egg, a work of art as amazing as an illusionist painting on the hemispherical ceiling of a cathedral and as complex as a horologe. I needed plenty of space and time for it, three or four continents and a few thousand years. I also needed special knowledge of mostly everything you can find in encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, painting albums, books of quantum physics, manuals of entomology and topology, books of history, and the Bible itself. I needed the form of a "novel" - but I prefer to call my text "a book" - able to encompass all of those pieces, like a clock where the cog-wheels, the springs, the rubies, etc. work together in harmony.
To do a work like that, I had to find a simple, strong, archetypal story that could sustain the whole mechanism like the central pillar of a carousel. And I remembered that, forty years ago, when I was a young assistant at the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest, I read a very short account by a 19th-century memorialist named Ion Ghica. It was the true story of a young servant, a childhood friend of the memorialist, called Tudor in Romanian and Theodoros in Greek (his mother was Greek). This child was different from all the others who played together at the mansion of Ghica's father, a big boyar, or aristocrat. That child of humble origin had a strong and mad obsession: he knew that someday he would become an emperor. When he played with other children, he was always the emperor and the others were his subjects, whom he punished with cruelty. At the age of 19, Theodoros disappeared from Wallachia, and nobody saw him again.
After several decades, Ion Ghica became Romania's ambassador in London and could study the correspondence between Queen Victoria and the great Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros the Second. And he was amazed: the name was the same, the handwriting was the same, the face of Tewodros on gravures and coins was very similar to Ghica's childhood friend, as he remembered him. Was it possible that a humble Wallachian servant had really become an emperor?
When I first read Ghica's page, I wrote in my journal: "What a story, what a destiny! It is a whole novel here, waiting for its novelist!" And I decided that I would be its novelist sometime. But forty years passed, and I never found the time and disposition to start this different book, unlike any other I wrote. I published lots of books in the meantime, most of them accounts of my very strange inner life, and only in 2020 did I really start the novel, which took me two years to write.
AR: The novel opens in a striking second-person voice, unidentified at first, addressing Theodoros, the main character, at the hour of the final judgment. What did the vocative perspective allow you to do that a first-person narrative wouldn’t?
MC: The narrative approach of Theodoros is very special, unlike most of the novels I know of. First, the point of view does not belong to a human. The story is told by the archangels, who send it to God at the final judgment. God is supposed to read it and decide whether Theodoros' soul goes to heaven or hell. Consequently, the narrative voice is in the second person, because a celestial voice must be an ethical one. The archangels address Theodoros directly from a sort of top-down video-game perspective, scold him for his mistakes and crimes, pity him at times, and maintain an intimate, empathic relationship with him. The shell of the novel is actually theological: heaven and hell take part in the terrestrial action, as in the Odyssey or Dante's Divine Comedy. Within this golden cassette, my character, a picaresque one, travels through several worlds and his experiences and adventures change him a lot during the fifty years of his life on Earth. Step by step, governed by a diabolical ambition, he climbs the social ladder and gets more and more power. To show his hubris, I used the conventions of the historical novel: Theodoros starts as a servant, then becomes a pirate in the Greek archipelago, then a warlord in Ethiopia, and finally fulfills his demented dream of becoming an emperor. I was also interested in the mechanism of power that corrupts the soul: my character finally becomes a bloody tyrant, responsible for thousands of innocent victims. Calling my book a historical novel would still be misleading: I prefer to call it a work of imagination set within a pseudo-historical framework. Although my novel is very well documented, I did not set out to reconstruct historical periods, but simply to construct them.
AR: It’s not giving the book away to say that the novel ends where it begins: at the moment of Theodoros’ death. This, to me, may suggest that a life only becomes clear and comprehensible at its conclusion. Does meaning, for you, exist only retrospectively?
MC: In the first chapter, my character kills himself with the pistol gifted to him by Queen Victoria when they were still friends. I thought it was a fine beginning of a story. Not because Theodoros could see his whole life at the moment of death. Actually, by that time, at the age of 50, his body and mind were destroyed by his life of excesses. The British troops were at his door. He could barely breathe and was semi-conscious. But the narrative voices enter the book from the heavens as a sort of tragic chorus, reviewing a spectacular and violent life (still with drops of tenderness and faith) and announcing the story's further developments.
Otherwise, life is life, in reality and in books: it is meant to be lived and thought of moment by moment, and not to be reviewed at its end.
AR: Theodoros is portrayed as both a historical figure and a mythic archetype. Do you see him as an individual or as a symbol of the human condition, perhaps its obsession with greatness?
MC: Theodoros was of course a real historical character. But I'm not interested in reconstructing lives and epochs. I invented Theodoros from narrative necessities, he is one of the many "translucid" characters in my book. By this I mean that they were historically real, but seemed to be the creation of a delirious writer's mind. Other real characters who are also re-invented or re-interpreted by me are Queen Victoria herself, King Solomon, the queen of Sheba, the ancestors of John Lennon, the giraffe brought from Nubia to France, or the other "emperor" in my book, born the same day as Theodoros, the delusional Abraham Norton who entitled himself the Emperor of the United States of America.
Theodoros is the embodiment of pride and ambition. His models in life are Alexander the Great and Napoleon. His first word as a baby was not mother or father, but "I want." Step by step he becomes a horrific and bloody dictator. Only his ambition is not a usual one, but, as you said, an archetypal one: he wants in fact to replace God on His celestial throne. Theodoros is more than an individual, although his life was rich in real and fantastic facts: he is the embodiment of all tyrants, from those in Antiquity to contemporary ones.
AR: Theodoros’ life comes across as failure and fulfilled prophecy. He achieves his dream, yet loses everything. Is this the central paradox that makes the story a tragedy?
MC: He himself might have seen his life as a tragedy. But who cares what he thought of himself? For the supreme reader, at the end of the book, his life is tragicomic. A mixture of heroism, melodrama, crime, love for his mother and for two or three women, operetta, religious quest, and real doom. Reading the book of his life, written by the archangels, God cries on some pages and laughs on others. Three fundamental values shaped Theodoros' life: power, love, and faith. By chasing the first, he loses the other two. He claims the world, but finally loses his soul.
The most important thing for me was to make my readers understand that Theodoros in my book is not a person in flesh and blood. He cannot be judged or condemned, he doesn't have a psychology of his own. He is just a character, complex and round, but not real. He's the product of my fantasy. I did not intend to write his biography, nor to write a historical novel. If you want it, Theodoros is not about Theodoros, but about the historical novel. This makes it, as I said, a pseudo-historical, or better said, a meta-historical novel. During the 600 pages of the book I did my best to undermine the idea of a real history by using, for example, anachronisms and other methods to explode the book's diachrony.
"If the words don't shine with all their power, if you don't send 'most of your stars out,' as Salinger wrote, everything is in vain, because for a real writer literature is more than a profession and even more than an art: it is a religion."
AR: In Theodoros, the truth of a life seems to lie in how events are reimagined and re-experienced rather than in chronological events. Memory becomes a way for the self to reinvent itself. Is this what fascinated you most about Tudor-Theodoros-Tewodros II – his ability to mold time in order to create new identities for himself?
MC: I had a great desire to create and describe fantastic, exotic, and luxuriant worlds, and there are at least five in my book: Wallachia, the empire of the eternal Winter, the Greek archipelago, expressing my fascination with the sea and the islands, Queen Victoria's colonial empire in the 19th century, Ethiopia as a cruel and magical fairy-tale realm, and the world of Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon. I just needed a character able to change all the time, to grow like an insect with metamorphosis, evolving from egg to larva, caterpillar, imago, and finally chrysalis in a never-ending chase for glory and power. Theodoros is not properly a character, but a function. He has a mission: to explore every layer of reality and non-reality in search of their hidden, mundane, and mystical meaning. He is the Opposite, the one elected for deciphering the signature of God on the terrestrial globe, and for finding the Ark of the Covenant in an Ethiopian monastery. So, he is much more than a tyrant, he's a sort of Krishna with a thousand arms, destroying and re-creating his world.
AR: This passage is simply wonderful:
"We remember it all for you, Theodoros, every instant of your life and of the world, for we, so high above your blue vault of sky, can see the stories from the time when they were all one, a single thread made from every thread, glittering with every glint, gilded with every gold, carrying the softness of linen and the roughness of wool and the scent of hemp and the translucence of silk and the bright colors of embroidery, way before any of it had been stretched across the loom, and we can follow each thread one by one, once they have separated and rejoined through the warp of days and nights, of milk and blood, of sun and moon and stars, where the lives of kings and monks and ploughmen are interbraided with those of carpenters and trimmers, of saints and whores and beggars, of those who toil in hell and those who shine like the sun in the Kingdom of Heaven, all of them woven into a single blessed and motley tapestry in which your life is but one pattern among thousands of patterns, shining like gems, that make up Creation."
Because of it, I want to talk to you about truth. I would venture that Theodoros subverts the Proustian ideal that memory is a path to truth. Instead of the revelation we expect from the narrators, those who “live in the skies” and “keep everything in their memory,” remembrance becomes synonymous with myth-making. The sentences also deceive us by their Proustian expansiveness, as they don’t serve to define perception but push towards excess. The narrative reveals that the self is really just a fiction it tells about itself. Would you say that Theodoros is, to some extent, an inversion of the Proustian project?
MC: Proust is a dead end in literature: he might have been great, and he certainly was, but one Proust is enough. I prefer the direction in fiction which started with Flaubert and went on with Joyce and Pynchon, extremely technical and precise writers, but at the same time full of imagination.
The literary truth is different from the truth in the real world, because it is surrounded like an aura by beauty, as Keats wrote in a splendid poem. In a literary text, truth is born within the synaptic space between a noun and an adjective, or between a verb and an adverb. Of course, in a novel we may include all the faces of reality: the political, social, ideological, psychological or theological aspects. But if the words don't shine with all their power, if you don't send "most of your stars out," as Salinger wrote, everything is in vain, because for a real writer literature is more than a profession and even more than an art: it is a religion.
In the world of Proust, truth is the equivalent of his "real" memories, lost with the passing of time and found again with the madeleine of literature. In my humble writings, truth has no "real" background, my characters' memories are invented when and where I need them. It is not the author, but the book itself that constructs its own laws, rules, and truths.
AR: In continuation, I’d like to draw attention to this passage:
"Truth isn't of this world, it comes from above or below, from the heavens or from the hell of the human soul. There may be more truth in visions, dreams, and madness, in fairy tales and fantasies, than in the loves and battles of this world."
Dreams and visions, tales and imagined futures often seem to carry as much truth as actual events. Is the novel suggesting that imagination is fully constitutive of reality?
MC: Reality is only one of the dreams produced by our mind. The books are simulations of reality, like in Everett's many-worlds theory in quantum physics. My mind, which helps me survive in the real world, also dreams my dreams and writes my writings. So I make no difference between memory, desire, fantasies, imagination, and dreams. Dream and reality are on the two faces of a Möbius strip: they seem separated, but actually there is no point of separation, because a Möbius strip has in fact only one face. What is important for me as a writer is the quality of my writing, its capacity to produce a coherent world that people could enjoy or even love.
AR: The novel moves from Valachia to the Greek archipelago, the Levant, and Ethiopia, each presented with a dream-like vividness. What kind of research underlies these geographical settings?
MC: Well, I didn't fill my room with books, as Thomas Mann did when he wrote Joseph and his Brothers. In the internet era, that would be bizarre anyway. As I told you before, reading Theodoros as a historical novel is a big, misleading mistake. But at the same time, the historical layer, as it is, is certainly well documented. Before publishing my book, my publisher sent it to a commission of historians to ensure the facts were accurate. They did not have much to change. I amused myself with the accuracy in the description of each and every world. When I started the book, I didn't know anything about Ethiopia, for example. I had to read a bit about it. A big secret of the writers who do historical novels is that you don't have to know everything about the epoch you describe. Like in Rembrandt's The Night Watch, it suffices to shine a golden button here, a helmet there, and leave everything else in penumbra. But when you're dealing with 3,000 years of history and an immensity of geographical space, your inner encyclopedia should be quite vast.
AR: Throughout his life, Theodoros remains tied to his origins in Valachia. To what extent is the book about exile and the impossibility of escaping one’s origins? Does that reflect your own experience?
MC: I wouldn't say so. In a way, sticking with our origin has very little to do with any kind of nationalism. Most of the time it reflects our intense nostalgia for our mother's womb, seen as the lost Paradise. For each of us, childhood was another planet, another realm, a dream-like one. The light was stronger, the colors brighter, our feelings more intense when we were young. Theodoros cannot forget his mother - the center of his universe - and the remote, obscure place where he was born, the mythical Wallachia. Even as an emperor in Ethiopia, although he learned the language of the country, Amharic, he still swore in Romanian and called his wife "Porumbita" (She-pigeon) in the same language. At the time of his death, he also prayed to God in Romanian. We are not nostalgic for a country or a nation, but for a mother-governed realm we cannot return to.
AR: We live in an era dominated by digital media and rapid consumption, yet your novels demand slow, immersive reading. Do you think our way of reading is affecting how literature is now being written, and how do you resist this?
MC: I don't write to please or flatter my audience, but because I like to write. I write for my pleasure, for me and for anyone who has the same literary taste that I have. I don't decide how I write a book or how big it will be. It is the book that decides about them. The length of a book is actually a stylistic feature. The violin produces a sound, the viola another one, the cello another one, and the contrabass a totally different one. If you need to write a sketch, fast and gracious, sounding like a violin, you don't need many pages. But if you want to express the human condition, your 500 pages should sound powerfully, breaking the windows into pieces like a contrabass. When I start to write, I never know how many pages I will write. I find it out by simply writing a chapter after another.
AR: Thinking of Emil Cioran, Marin Sorescu, Mircea Eliade, and a few others, it seems the Romanian writer always stands at a unique vantage point, both party and outsider of major Western literary traditions. How has this in-between position defined your writing?
MC: This is a good and valid observation. Because, in a way, there is nothing like a Romanian writer. People have a certain image about how a Hungarian or Polish writer should be, for example, but they have a very vague image of what a Romanian writer would sound like. "To like a poet, you have first to like the culture he is coming from. If you don't know it, or you don't like it, you won't like that poet too," wrote Wittgenstein. Few people have expectations from a Romanian writer, not only because they ignore his - or her - culture and literature, but also because of that in-between situation you mentioned: a Romanian writer is usually not as close to Western culture to be seen as one of its representatives, but at the same time not exotic enough to be seen as different and, by this, interesting.
As for me, I couldn't care less. I never saw myself as "a representative" for anything. I am myself, not identical, nor exotic, not Romanian, nor a foreigner, not progressive, nor conservative, almost not man, nor woman. Like Musil's Ulrich, I have no features. I am not even a writer, but merely "someone who writes," to quote the title of my journal. I don't arrange the books on my bookshelves at home by geography, or historical epochs, or literary genres. They are in a happy mixture, Catullus close to David Foster Wallace and Sei Shonagon between Rilke and Francesco Colonna. The only distinction I have always made among writers was between good ones and bad ones. How can I tell who is good and who is bad? Very easy, by reading the first page of their book.
AR: The original edition of Theodoros was published in 2022. The English translation is finally about to reach us now, five years later. What can we expect next from the architect of dream-realities (if you’ll allow me this epithet)?
MC: I’m working very hard, and it's actually killing me, on a new book, the strangest I have done so far and maybe one of the strangest possible. Its title is The Impudic Death.
MC: I had a great desire to create and describe fantastic, exotic, and luxuriant worlds, and there are at least five in my book: Wallachia, the empire of the eternal Winter, the Greek archipelago, expressing my fascination with the sea and the islands, Queen Victoria's colonial empire in the 19th century, Ethiopia as a cruel and magical fairy-tale realm, and the world of Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon. I just needed a character able to change all the time, to grow like an insect with metamorphosis, evolving from egg to larva, caterpillar, imago, and finally chrysalis in a never-ending chase for glory and power. Theodoros is not properly a character, but a function. He has a mission: to explore every layer of reality and non-reality in search of their hidden, mundane, and mystical meaning. He is the Opposite, the one elected for deciphering the signature of God on the terrestrial globe, and for finding the Ark of the Covenant in an Ethiopian monastery. So, he is much more than a tyrant, he's a sort of Krishna with a thousand arms, destroying and re-creating his world.
AR: This passage is simply wonderful:
"We remember it all for you, Theodoros, every instant of your life and of the world, for we, so high above your blue vault of sky, can see the stories from the time when they were all one, a single thread made from every thread, glittering with every glint, gilded with every gold, carrying the softness of linen and the roughness of wool and the scent of hemp and the translucence of silk and the bright colors of embroidery, way before any of it had been stretched across the loom, and we can follow each thread one by one, once they have separated and rejoined through the warp of days and nights, of milk and blood, of sun and moon and stars, where the lives of kings and monks and ploughmen are interbraided with those of carpenters and trimmers, of saints and whores and beggars, of those who toil in hell and those who shine like the sun in the Kingdom of Heaven, all of them woven into a single blessed and motley tapestry in which your life is but one pattern among thousands of patterns, shining like gems, that make up Creation."
Because of it, I want to talk to you about truth. I would venture that Theodoros subverts the Proustian ideal that memory is a path to truth. Instead of the revelation we expect from the narrators, those who “live in the skies” and “keep everything in their memory,” remembrance becomes synonymous with myth-making. The sentences also deceive us by their Proustian expansiveness, as they don’t serve to define perception but push towards excess. The narrative reveals that the self is really just a fiction it tells about itself. Would you say that Theodoros is, to some extent, an inversion of the Proustian project?
MC: Proust is a dead end in literature: he might have been great, and he certainly was, but one Proust is enough. I prefer the direction in fiction which started with Flaubert and went on with Joyce and Pynchon, extremely technical and precise writers, but at the same time full of imagination.
The literary truth is different from the truth in the real world, because it is surrounded like an aura by beauty, as Keats wrote in a splendid poem. In a literary text, truth is born within the synaptic space between a noun and an adjective, or between a verb and an adverb. Of course, in a novel we may include all the faces of reality: the political, social, ideological, psychological or theological aspects. But if the words don't shine with all their power, if you don't send "most of your stars out," as Salinger wrote, everything is in vain, because for a real writer literature is more than a profession and even more than an art: it is a religion.
In the world of Proust, truth is the equivalent of his "real" memories, lost with the passing of time and found again with the madeleine of literature. In my humble writings, truth has no "real" background, my characters' memories are invented when and where I need them. It is not the author, but the book itself that constructs its own laws, rules, and truths.
AR: In continuation, I’d like to draw attention to this passage:
"Truth isn't of this world, it comes from above or below, from the heavens or from the hell of the human soul. There may be more truth in visions, dreams, and madness, in fairy tales and fantasies, than in the loves and battles of this world."
Dreams and visions, tales and imagined futures often seem to carry as much truth as actual events. Is the novel suggesting that imagination is fully constitutive of reality?
MC: Reality is only one of the dreams produced by our mind. The books are simulations of reality, like in Everett's many-worlds theory in quantum physics. My mind, which helps me survive in the real world, also dreams my dreams and writes my writings. So I make no difference between memory, desire, fantasies, imagination, and dreams. Dream and reality are on the two faces of a Möbius strip: they seem separated, but actually there is no point of separation, because a Möbius strip has in fact only one face. What is important for me as a writer is the quality of my writing, its capacity to produce a coherent world that people could enjoy or even love.
AR: The novel moves from Valachia to the Greek archipelago, the Levant, and Ethiopia, each presented with a dream-like vividness. What kind of research underlies these geographical settings?
MC: Well, I didn't fill my room with books, as Thomas Mann did when he wrote Joseph and his Brothers. In the internet era, that would be bizarre anyway. As I told you before, reading Theodoros as a historical novel is a big, misleading mistake. But at the same time, the historical layer, as it is, is certainly well documented. Before publishing my book, my publisher sent it to a commission of historians to ensure the facts were accurate. They did not have much to change. I amused myself with the accuracy in the description of each and every world. When I started the book, I didn't know anything about Ethiopia, for example. I had to read a bit about it. A big secret of the writers who do historical novels is that you don't have to know everything about the epoch you describe. Like in Rembrandt's The Night Watch, it suffices to shine a golden button here, a helmet there, and leave everything else in penumbra. But when you're dealing with 3,000 years of history and an immensity of geographical space, your inner encyclopedia should be quite vast.
AR: Throughout his life, Theodoros remains tied to his origins in Valachia. To what extent is the book about exile and the impossibility of escaping one’s origins? Does that reflect your own experience?
MC: I wouldn't say so. In a way, sticking with our origin has very little to do with any kind of nationalism. Most of the time it reflects our intense nostalgia for our mother's womb, seen as the lost Paradise. For each of us, childhood was another planet, another realm, a dream-like one. The light was stronger, the colors brighter, our feelings more intense when we were young. Theodoros cannot forget his mother - the center of his universe - and the remote, obscure place where he was born, the mythical Wallachia. Even as an emperor in Ethiopia, although he learned the language of the country, Amharic, he still swore in Romanian and called his wife "Porumbita" (She-pigeon) in the same language. At the time of his death, he also prayed to God in Romanian. We are not nostalgic for a country or a nation, but for a mother-governed realm we cannot return to.
AR: We live in an era dominated by digital media and rapid consumption, yet your novels demand slow, immersive reading. Do you think our way of reading is affecting how literature is now being written, and how do you resist this?
MC: I don't write to please or flatter my audience, but because I like to write. I write for my pleasure, for me and for anyone who has the same literary taste that I have. I don't decide how I write a book or how big it will be. It is the book that decides about them. The length of a book is actually a stylistic feature. The violin produces a sound, the viola another one, the cello another one, and the contrabass a totally different one. If you need to write a sketch, fast and gracious, sounding like a violin, you don't need many pages. But if you want to express the human condition, your 500 pages should sound powerfully, breaking the windows into pieces like a contrabass. When I start to write, I never know how many pages I will write. I find it out by simply writing a chapter after another.
AR: Thinking of Emil Cioran, Marin Sorescu, Mircea Eliade, and a few others, it seems the Romanian writer always stands at a unique vantage point, both party and outsider of major Western literary traditions. How has this in-between position defined your writing?
MC: This is a good and valid observation. Because, in a way, there is nothing like a Romanian writer. People have a certain image about how a Hungarian or Polish writer should be, for example, but they have a very vague image of what a Romanian writer would sound like. "To like a poet, you have first to like the culture he is coming from. If you don't know it, or you don't like it, you won't like that poet too," wrote Wittgenstein. Few people have expectations from a Romanian writer, not only because they ignore his - or her - culture and literature, but also because of that in-between situation you mentioned: a Romanian writer is usually not as close to Western culture to be seen as one of its representatives, but at the same time not exotic enough to be seen as different and, by this, interesting.
As for me, I couldn't care less. I never saw myself as "a representative" for anything. I am myself, not identical, nor exotic, not Romanian, nor a foreigner, not progressive, nor conservative, almost not man, nor woman. Like Musil's Ulrich, I have no features. I am not even a writer, but merely "someone who writes," to quote the title of my journal. I don't arrange the books on my bookshelves at home by geography, or historical epochs, or literary genres. They are in a happy mixture, Catullus close to David Foster Wallace and Sei Shonagon between Rilke and Francesco Colonna. The only distinction I have always made among writers was between good ones and bad ones. How can I tell who is good and who is bad? Very easy, by reading the first page of their book.
AR: The original edition of Theodoros was published in 2022. The English translation is finally about to reach us now, five years later. What can we expect next from the architect of dream-realities (if you’ll allow me this epithet)?
MC: I’m working very hard, and it's actually killing me, on a new book, the strangest I have done so far and maybe one of the strangest possible. Its title is The Impudic Death.
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The author of more than 25 books, Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic, and essayist. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others, and has been translated into 23 languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago Books in Sean Cotter’s English translation. Solenoid, published by Deep Vellum, won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. He lives in Bucharest.
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Theodoros by Mircea Cărtărescu (transl. Sean Cotter), forthcoming from Deep Vellum (October 2027)
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*Excerpts from Theodoros in this interview translated from Romanian by Daniel Carden Nemo
