Mircea Cărtărescu writes in Nostalgia of “fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for things extravagant.” It is this extravagance, dreamlike and unstable that draws me toward his work and that of Maria Gabriela Llansol. Each pursues a renewal of form that dissolves genre, unfolding into a narrative totality neither novel nor essay nor poem.
These are texts that move at the threshold between memory and dream. They recall Dante and Kafka, the misdirections of Borges, the shape-shifting of Orlando. Myths and recollections interlace in a structure not unlike that described by Proust: “I could not discern between them—between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or ‘perfume,’ and finally those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand.”
Such writing does not describe the unconscious. It stages its movements. I think of Llansol’s collages, of Blinding, which I’ve not yet begun, and Solenoid, still waiting in translation. In the meantime, I’ve been reading Alter’s translation of Job, where voice fractures and rejoins around something unanswerable. The oneiric, the cryptogrammic, these forms allow not escape but a way of staying with what remains obscure in thought. They offer a syntax for that which resists clarity, without reducing it to metaphor.