An interview with Marius Chivu
The book Map to a conversation (Harta conversației, Ed. Paralela 45, 2026) includes your interviews with M. Cărtărescu conducted along 23 years (between 2002 – the first time you interviewed him, and 2025). The book also includes collective discussions (the 2025 Dilema interview), podcasts (All You Can Read, Cronicari digitali), as well as short pieces where M. Cărtărescu answers to various questionnaires or literary surveys (favourite cartoon and whether he ever feels nostalgic, etc). The book even includes your amazing critical essay on Cărtărescu’s book Solenoid, which was actually translated and included in the Spanish version of the book (Solenoide, Editorial Impedimenta, 2019 – translated by Marian Ochoa de Eribe).
What made you publish the interviews in this format and what is the added value of the book?
I was kind of aware that throughout my career as a cultural journalist, I had probably interviewed Mircea Cărtărescu the most and, when I counted the interviews, I realized they could easily be included in a book. When we read them again, Mircea and I realized that the 13 interviews carried throughout 23 years constitute a relevant companion to both his literary work and career, as they reveal his transformation from a national writer to an international author, by far the most translated, read and acclaimed international Romanian writer in the history – he accomplished all these while writing exclusively in Romanian.
When I first interviewed him, in 2002, Mircea Cărtărescu was basically an unknown writer to the rest of the world, whose literary work was highly poetic, he had not published neither his journals, nor his essays and his Blinding trilogy was a work in progress. His name was not yet brought up in relation to the Nobel. And the idea that someday there will be foreign rock bands named after his novels was pure fantasy.
So, the merit of this book of interviews, apart from the fact that it is the first in his career, is that it captures the becoming of Mircea Cărtărescu through his own words, it maps his transformation from cocoon to a butterfly.
The readers who will pay attention to his answers will find nuances and new perspectives, deep reflection, as well as the consistency in his thinking, his firm convictions about literature and writing. Taken together, these interviews, most of which are otherwise unavailable in paper archives or invisible in the vastness of the internet, also constitute an object of literary history, of scholarly interest.
How would you like people to read this book?
I would really like people reading it pencil in hand, taking breaks to browse through and even reread the books mentioned in the interview. I would also like that every time somebody reads a book by Mircea Cărtărescu to also read the adjoining interview I did immediately after the respective book was released. Especially as these interviews represent an addenda to his literature, the author’s voice-over, exactly like in some uncut DVD versions, where some of the movies are accompanied by the directors’ comments.
In your Foreword for the book, you rightly point out that the book captures M. Cărtărescu’s journey from a local writer to an internationally acclaimed author. What are, in your opinion, the factors that have enabled this change of status?
Looking back, this change of status was inevitable for a few related reasons. He expanded his literary work without showing any signs of exhaustion. And this happened while foreign editors took a growing interest in his work. In this span of time, Mircea Cărtărescu finished his Blinding trilogy, then wrote Solenoid, the Levant in prose, Melancholy, his diaries and Theodoros, my favourite, maybe his most ambitious and original writing. All these books contributed to establishing Cărtărescu as a distinct and recognizable voice in the literature of the world, placing him in a unique position within the contemporary universal literary landscape. This is also attested by international reviews, where literary critics are basically in awe with the originality of his writing. In this background of growing international exposure, his very solid literary work started to accumulate critical prestige, distinctions and awards, while also gaining the public’s appreciation for his original, profound, and stylistically exquisite books.
Cărtărescu is a happy example of literary value meeting the appreciation of both the critics and the readers in the 20+ languages in which his books have been translated.
Are there any differences between the local Cărtărescu and the international Cărtărescu?
In Romania, where the book market is minuscule, and a major part of the population has trouble reading fiction, his audience is uncomparable to his fame. Romanians did hear of Cărtărescu, some of them follow him on Facebook (he has 165.000 followers), but I am not sure how many of them have read some of his books, and how many actually appreciate his sophisticated writing, which is also lexically and stylistically demanding. But this happens to all major artists, and I think, for instance, of Cristian Mungiu. To sum it up, there is a restricted Romanian audience with good cultural, literary and cinematic education, open minded, who are able to understand and appreciate a writer awarded with the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and The International Dublin Literary Award or a film director who is two times winner of the Palme d`Or.
On the other hand, the Cărtărescian imaginary has been, culturally speaking, assimilated. There are places in Bucharest that some Romanians are now seeing through Cărtărescu’s eyes. The Assan’s Mill, for instance, an industrial ruin from the 19th century in the Ștefan cel Mare neighbourhood, has a specific literary identity thanks to Cărtărescu. Many fans from Bucharest have been hunting for the shiphouse in Solenoid. Cărtărescu has written cult books (Nostalgia, Orbitor, Levantul), he also wrote bestsellers (Why we love women – a short story collection, mind you! – is the most sold fiction book in Romania over the last half of century – aprox. 130.000 copies -, despite the fact that at some point it was even pirated by a mafioso politician who owns a print house and who was later on criminally condemned for corruption). Furthermore, some of Cărtărescu’s posts on social media go viral or become memes.
And do you think it is possible that any other Romanian author might have a similar journey and achieve such an amazing international career?
I don’t really think so.
You also mention that “for any literary critic it is a great privilege to be the contemporary of a writer whose literature he can truly believe in and whom he can accompany”. Do you still think it is possible for literary critics to have such a privileged relationship with the literary work of an author, in the current context of over-production of fiction and a diminished role for literary criticism?
Book reviews, as this is the kind of literary criticism I refer to, not the scholarly one, has disappeared at the same time with the severe demise of the cultural media in print and the explosion of new formats in the social media. Literary criticism – a specific discourse, which I practiced myself during the two decades when I also conducted the interviews in this book, has ceased to exist and is no longer possible. There are few magazines now publishing literary columns of two thousand words, a minimum when writing a relevant book review. Now there is the rating system on Goodreads. But it’s impossible to equate two thousand words with a star. And I refer here to fiction, not to commercial genres, which do not need to be accompanied/commented/assessed through a critical discourse. After all, this book of interviews is itself a quasi-anachronic object. Interviewing a writer today usually means podcasts, vlogs, videoclips or surveys. Reading a literary interview for several minutes, maybe even hours, has become an old school activity.
But to answer your question, I do not know if that type of literary closeness, where I had the chance to review Cărtărescu’s books for twenty years, and while he was writing them (in a way, my own becoming as a literary critic parallels his writings), I do not think it is still possible. I do not know if it’s actually still possible to write book reviews constantly, week by week. To review books every week now seems anachronistic.
The book uncovers some local myths displayed by the Romanian literary guild: how a great artist will never be understood by his peers, how success is always seen as relocated in the posthumous “life” and how success itself is felt as being “suspicious” (to quote the late Alex. Leo Șerban). Are these myths still standing or do you think we are traversing a moment of reckoning and of rewriting (at least some of the) Romanian literary myths?
These myths suffered a transformation at the same time as both the literary industry and the literary medium were transformed. With the development of a consumer book market, which happened in Romania over the last decade, success became not only a complex concept, but also an ambiguous one. We now have Romanian authors, without them being writers, we have stars, influencers, fake experts (in personal development, psychology, alternative medicine, post/new age-isms, spirituality etc.) whose success is incomprehensible, but who sell more than real authors and actual experts. For the readers of commercial (mediocre) books who cannot get past the first 50 pages of Solenoid and who find the language in Theodoros to be very difficult, Cărtărescu’s international success can only be „suspicious”. Especially as they also usually do not even agree with Cărtărescu’s political options.
Otherwise, Cărtărescu himself rewrote a major myth: that the literary writing of a great Romanian author would be untranslatable, that his work would not be acclaimed internationally while writing in Romanian, while living in Romania and while being alive.
The book also investigates some of the most controversial contemporary global questions: the role of AI in understanding concepts such as creativity, the future role of writers, how translation as a literary form might change and how even the language we might (or not!) use to read and write might become unrecognizable in the future. Could you tell our readers some of the stances M. Cărtărescu is taking on these particular issues and how he is contributing to the global conversation around them?
In his latest interview in the book, in 2025, Mircea Cărtărescu thinks that AI is already entrenched in fiction and therefore the use of AI in arts has the chance „of becoming a norm, and the idea of author – an absurdity of the past”, the consequence being yet another symbolic death in literature, that is posterity.
Cărtărescu’s prediction is that in the future innovation and creativity will no longer be possible in the arts the way they are now, as all the topics imagined by humankind will be already exhausted by serial „content”, obtained through reuse, recycling, recombination, hybridization etc. From TV series to computer games to TikTok clips, AI clips, memes etc.
Speaking strictly from a literary point of view,, this permanent automatization and standardization brought by AI will affect literary translations the most out of the arts – a literary translation he considers to be „the one that allows for the translation of a writing from its original language to a different language, which means, mutatis mutandis, the translation of a culture to another culture, of a lifestyle to another one and the translation of a value system to a different one – we do not translate mere languages, we translate realities.” Or, when reality is translated, in the total or partial absence of the human factor, the consequences can be both unpredictable and immeasurable.