Mircea Cartarescu: "I wanted to enter into the forbidden room of sexuality"

BarcelonaFor several years now, Catalan readers have been able to savor the meticulous, introspective, and hallucinatory prose of Mircea Cartarescu (Bucharest, 1956). While Periscopi published Solenoid (2017) and the Blinding trilogy (2018-2022), novels translated by Antònia Escandell Tur, thanks to the Mallorcan publisher Lleonard Muntaner and translator Xavier Montoliu Pauli, the volumes of short stories Why We Love Women (2016), the poems of Nothing (2018), an extensive and essential anthology of his Diaries (2024) have arrived, and now, Travesti, which according to the Romanian author was "the beginning of everything that has come after." This short novel, published in Romanian in 1994, presents a 34-year-old writer who, with the desire to emerge from the crisis he finds himself in, recalls the summer of his adolescence spent in camps where contact with nature, music, and inquiries into his own sexuality changed his life.

Hours before gathering 150 devoted readers at the Aliança del Poblenou to talk about the book and the power of his literature, Cartarescu—who is mentioned every year as a possible Nobel Prize winner—is taking longer than expected to arrive at the interview with ARA at the No Llegiu bookstore in El Clot. Could he have had some problem? Perhaps he forgot the appointment? But the delay is quickly justified.

I hope nothing bad has happened to him.

— On the contrary. I come from the Sagrada Família, where I have just experienced an encounter with the absolute through the genius that was Antoni Gaudí. The Sagrada Família seems to me the most beautiful church in the world, because it is different from all the others. It is a monument designed to last forever.

His books also have the virtue of being timeless. Travesti, which he wrote in the early 90s, continues to be translated and read.

— When I brought the book to my editor, it upset him. He told me that I was giving him a very short book and that he was expecting a novel of hundreds of pages. Travesti did not have much luck at first. It took the people of the literary world by surprise, and the readers took a while to arrive, although I am happy because little by little it has been truly understood and, as of now, it is a cult book.

Did he write it when he was a high school teacher?

— I was a teacher at a primary school on the outskirts of Bucharest.

If I had been a high school teacher I would have asked him about the students' reaction, because the action of the novel takes place largely when the protagonist, Victor, is 17 years old and goes to summer camp with boys and girls his age. There he meets Lulu, a character who leaves a mark on him.

— The book's lack of popularity when it appeared has to do with the suspicion that certain topics aroused in my country. For example, homosexuality. If you were homosexual, you could end up in prison. During the communist regime but also in the following years, well into the 90s.

Travesti puts on the table the construction of Victor's sexuality based on his attraction to his camp companions, but also on his complex relationship with Lulu.

— Adolescence is a period of great confusion in relation to sexual identity. When you reach it, you find yourself in front of a great palace full of entrances that allow you access to all the rooms except one. Writing Travesti I wanted to delve into the forbidden room of sexuality, into the essence of the essences of my being. It is a novel of a psychoanalytic nature, the study of a specific case personified in a 34-year-old writer, Victor.

In his diary, he explains that this novel is "a digging into the dirty pockets of the brain". Why?

— I do not remember this metaphor. In fact, I find that I have written much more beautiful ones than this. Writing Travesti was important for me, because I needed it to consolidate my side as a narrator, which I had made known in 1989 with the stories of Nostalgia [in Spanish by Impedimenta]. Without Travesti I would not have written the Encegador trilogy, which in Romanian began to appear starting in 1996.

When we meet Victor he is 34 years old, but he remembers that adolescent summer when he was so obsessed with reading and writing that he mixed reality and fiction.

— When he writes, Victor wants to put an imaginary bandage over a wound. Literature has a healing function. That is why he shuts himself in a summer house and remembers his 17 years. He needs to know what the hell is happening to him. He makes a psychoanalytic effort with the desire to heal.

Read now, we see Victor as someone with mental health problems.

— Without a doubt. It is a clinical case, as I was saying. He is born as an androgyne, and it is not until he is four years old that the family chooses his sex. Since then, he grows up with the impression of having a secret sister who visits him through his dreams. This sister obsesses him, because she represents the woman who was eliminated from his life when they labeled him a boy. Victor's neurosis goes through many stages. One of the decisive ones is the one that takes place during a stay at the Budila camps, when he is 17 years old, and he meets Lulu.

Discover an exuberant nature, a taste for rock music, and a growing curiosity about sex.

— The relationship with his colleagues takes the form of a tragicomic farce that causes him a lot of neurosis. Lulu disguises himself as a woman and pretends to sexually assault her. This component ends up revealing to him the androgyny he was talking about.

Victor compares Lulu to a "miserable boil", but also highlights her thigh "with soft and transparent skin" and that doll she likes to rock, dressed as a girl.

— Lulu really existed. He was even called that, Lulu. He was a classmate who died tragically when he was hit by a tram before he turned 20. This death left a mark on me. Years later, when I considered writing the novel about adolescence that ended up being Travesti, Lulu reappeared and inspired me. Two influences that I still see in this novel of mine are The Confusions of Young Törless, by Robert Musil [1906] and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke [1910].

As he marked the receipt of the book, what about the gaze queer that permeates its pages?

— At first, I was taken aback that it was considered a queer novel. Some fragments of Travesti soon appeared in LGBTIQ+ anthologies. When it was published in Italy, they described it as "a little gay Bible". Even a production company specializing in queer themes proposed making a film adaptation that was never shot. This context placed the focus on the novel in a way I hadn't foreseen, but it was a happy accident.

I would say that Victor's androgyny is viewed positively in the book.

— Throughout life, maintaining a certain androgyny is very benign for an artist. Just like Tiresias, we creators must know how to see the world from both perspectives, both the masculine and the feminine.

As I was telling you before, Travesti appeared in a country that persecuted homosexuality. Three decades later there is a reactionary discourse in relation to sexual identity that is growing again, spurred on by the most conservative right.

— I detest sexism in any context, whether political, social, or artistic. This whole online phenomenon of the manosphere feels unpleasant to me, and it is full of lies, but unfortunately, it is very present today due to the expansion of far-right ideas.

Was he as suffering an adolescent as the protagonist of Travesti?

— Yes. During adolescence, everyone is overcome by suffering. It has to do not only with the need to find the path of your sexuality, but the general path. Until you achieve it, you hate yourself, and you need continuous affirmations that never quite arrive. The suffering of adolescence does not end until you know where you are going. I had a lonely adolescence, full of difficult moments and lost loves and friendships. The long summers made me feel panic because of the abyss of loneliness into which I fell.

Did he get out of this abyss thanks to writing?

— I discovered authentic suffering and humiliation when I did my compulsory military service. That terrible physical experience made me forget all the discomfort I felt as an adolescent. Paradoxically, it surpassed the previous suffering. When I finished the military service, I entered the faculty to study philology. This was the panacea. Writing compensated for everything; it was my path and continues to be so.

In some interview you have compared your work to a staircase: "To reach the top you must start with the lowest steps and, little by little, go up". After two extensive and ambitious novels, what are you preparing?

— This 2026 I have published a collection of aphorisms, Texistència, and before the year ends another book of mine will see the light, Querubí, made in collaboration with a great contemporary Romanian painter, Sorin Ilfoveanu. His illustrations comment on my texts and vice versa. I have written a dozen stories that come from characters of the Bible: one half are from the Old Testament and the other half from the New Testament. They are six men and six women. Querubí is a secondary work in my production. For a year now I have been working on an extensive novel of which I have already reached the halfway point. I plan to finish it during 2027. I will not tell you anything about it, because I believe in that saying that circulates among writers that goes "If you explain what you are doing, you will not finish it".