Each Return Less Secure

This blog could easily become a whirlpool, circling obsessively around a small handful of writers who, at least to this reading mind, carve out sharply individual niches. Or perhaps a confluence of whirlpools, brushing at the edges, sending off further eddies and vortexes. That image feels accurate: a mind drawn to recurrence, but unable to rest in it.

Lately, two writers return insistently, especially at night: Mircea Cărtărescu and Maria Gabriela Llansol. What draws their work into proximity? Both summon an oneiric, interior geography. Both transgress genre, drifting through realism, poetic vision, analytic fragment. In the fractured translations available, their books seem less concerned with story than with reflection, less plotted than dreamt. They write, it seems, toward a hermitic autobiography, though neither confessional nor resolved.

Time, in their work, does not progress. It dilates, folds, or collapses into vast, implausible spaces. What governs instead is a kind of spatial logic, rooms within rooms, pages that double back, figures who pass through without biography. Time slackens, and something else holds attention: intensity, perhaps, or recurrence unmoored from sequence.

There is also lineage. Both invoke ancient sources, the Bible, Ovid, and seem haunted by a secret, intertextual literature: Borges, Kafka, the Woolf of Orlando, perhaps even Nietzsche. And writers once tasted and left behind, Pynchon, García Márquez, whose influence lingers like the memory of a language no longer spoken. Their books ask to be read not forward but across, as if through veils, or echo chambers.

None of this clarifies why they continue to hold attention. Only that they do, and that each return makes the prior reading less secure. That may be the point: to keep reading until reading becomes indistinguishable from dreaming, from thinking, from waking.