Fabula before Fabula – Mircea Cărtărescu

The book Beautiful Strangers experiments with autofiction, following the writer Cărtărescu and his adventures. As the author wrote in the introduction, the stories are “based on real events and persons, but there is much more fiction in them than it might seem at first glance.” A young poet’s odyssey is occasioned in the story Anthrax. During his first-ever reading in the Romanian provinces, he gets a letter from Denmark whose envelope has allegedly been dosed with anthrax. In the second story, Beautiful Strangers, twelve beautiful strangers, a curious “writers’ dozen”, set out to conquer France over the course of a two-week trip. In these short stories, Mircea Cărtărescu sets himself up as the protagonist and delightfully (self-) ironic chronicler of this whimsical tourist party’s exploits. Full of humour, satire and grotesqueness, his works blur the boundaries between fantasy and ordinariness, supernatural and natural, between the objective and subjective. Cărtărescu creates his own encyclopaedia of reality and dreamscape, fusing them with biographicalism, self-referentiality and magical realism. 

The book has been translated by Aleš Mustar.

Writer, poet, essayist, university professor, literary critic and publicist Mircea Cărtărescu (1956) is Romania's most important living author, also nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has published over 30 volumes so far, translated in 25 languages – among them novels like Blinding, Solenoid and The Levant, short stories, essays and books of poetry. He was awarded with several international prizes for literature, including the Vilenica Prize.

The talk will take place in English, with simultaneous translation into Slovenian.
The event is part of Reading Culture, a programme co-financed by the Slovenian Book Agency.