Between 2020 and 2021, I came across a Hungarian writer, Lazlo Krasnahorkai. In these last days of 2021, I stumbled upon a Romanian writer, Mircea Cartarescu. The differences are striking; however, a triplicate reason recurs in the powerful volumes of both writers: the fall of ideality; the ruthlessness of a cosmos devoid of reassuring embellishments, a form of mad lucidity; individuals who move through the mud, between reality, dream, and madness, disgusting yet wonderfully human. Are they the results of the collapse of a possibility for a world different from tentacled capitalism?
A fragment from that wonderful and indescribable narrative object that is Solenoide by Mircea Cartarescu (il Saggiatore, 2021):
"I rinse that disgusting substance several times and then I start combing my hair over the sink with its porcelain gleaming with cleanliness. And suddenly the parasites begin to fall, two, five, eight, fifteen... They are tiny, each contained within its droplet of water. I can barely discern their bodies with their distended abdomens and three little legs, still moving, on each side. Their body and mine, as I find myself, naked and wet, bent over the sink, are made of the same organic tissues. They have organs and similar functions. They have eyes that see the same reality; they have feet that carry them into the same infinite and incomprehensible world. They want to live, just as I do. I push them away from the surfaces of the sink with a jet of water. They go down through the pipes, arriving in the underground sewers" (p. 20).