Real and fantastic Bucharest limits in Mircea Cartarescu's writings

Abstract

The postmodernist Romanian writer Mircea CARTARESCU creates, in all his writings, a topos that is re-invented each time one tries to define it – Bucharest. Half-real, half-fantastic, the city is a full character on its own. The limits of this magic place are very well hidden: over a well known market place, the eyes of the loved one are floating as zeppelins in the sky; in the ugly and permanently reconstructed city, in a waste land, the Snow and the Intelligence are born; in a communist district of the city, some children find the entrance to the basement of the block of flats (but the block did not have one); the natural science museum Grigore Antipa hides a small room where two teenagers change their bodies and bring to life all the stuffed animals exposed; in one remote suburb of the capital, a group of seven girls play strange games that allows them to see the future, to travel in space and create God and the Universe; the newly bought car of an Architect, becomes the place where all the history of the music is recreated with a horn and from where the Earth will be led. The most elaborated fantasies find a common place from where they start and where they end: the city that once upon a time was called “little Paris”