When I saw it for the first time, in 1990, “Levantul” Carterescu (a colleague from the so-called Redacția ING, at the Polytechnic brought him) was a lightning strike. Although I was a fairly avid reader, I didn’t follow the Eighties generation very closely, partly because it was difficult; they were rarely published, because of the position of the press in communism, in tiny circulations, or a poem at a time slipped through the tons of waste paper of the party and state press. You had to have “inside information”, attend a festival or have other contacts to know where to look for them (because the system had its loopholes, which the young author knew how to use… but the reader also had to know where to look)

But the Levant…

He probably gave away at least 10 copies during this period.

One of the clear ideas of that era was that the age of the epic was gone forever. Since there was only one epic worthy of the name in Romanian literature, the Tsyganiad, and that too a heroic-comic one, and the attempts of the Pasoptists failed completely, the situation will forever remain this way. We lived in times of realism (socialist or not), when great enthusiasm was no longer possible.

But Carterescu “fooled” us all. Having set the action in those years of revolutions, using including the language and ideas of that era, he teleported us to the time, yes, the time when epics were written. A subtle irony, thanks to which he still managed to keep his distance so as not to fall into pathos (I use the word in the Romanian, not the American sense) and naivety, paraphrases, typical postmodern insertions achieved a subtlety and an extraordinary balance between the romantic concept of the work and the modern character of the content. A masterpiece, without a doubt.

The Levant was proof that at the end of the 20th century you could write an epic, but you couldn’t follow its path: you couldn’t write a second epic using the same “tertype.” Because it would seem that it would be: an imitation.

Only if….

I finished Theodoros about two weeks ago and gave myself a break (not enough) to digest this novel, which somehow completes the cycle opened by Levantulus. Because, in a certain way, this is what we are talking about, a kind of complementary double of the epic we were talking about, the theme of doubles, otherwise, is so dear to the author.

Theodoros is a novel, and it can be read as a novel with several converging planes, but it is still an epic in its own way.

His hero is really a Don Quixote, saturated not with the chivalric romances of the Western Middle Ages, but, as we stand at the gates of the East, with Alexandria and other popular books, papal teachings (short of theological research) and rudiments. philosophy, romantic stories about “fate”. Although, while you read the novel, you do not for a moment doubt the plausibility, we can say that Theodoros develops in an intellectual environment that is as authentic as possible in relation to the era; nothing is plus or minus.

The novel has everything, material from which you can develop dozens of stories, strange incidents, stories about robbers and pirates, monks and monasteries, Queen Victoria and her politics. There is nothing incredible, on the contrary, the material is clearly documented, meticulously (part of the information was checked with Wikipedia to make sure), but above the avalanche of facts is the image of a hero in search of destiny. Read the entire article and comment on it on Contributors.ro