CHILDHOOD AS ARIADNE’S THREAD OF WRITING. THE PRODIGIOUS CHILD IN “THEODOROS” BY MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU
CHILDHOOD AS ARIADNE’S THREAD OF WRITING. THE PRODIGIOUS CHILD IN “THEODOROS” BY MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU

Summary/Abstract: Mircea Cărtărescu turns the unreliable narrator into a story about faith as opposed to volition in the 19th century with implications of contemporary facts and with a postmodernist mixture of un-chronological events. ”Theodoros ”, the novel by Cărtărescu, plays out the exceptional destiny of a child born in the family of servants in Walachia who, after some notorious deeds with the band of the famous outlaw Iancu Jianu becomes a pirate of the Greek archipelago and the future king Tewodros II of Ethiopia. In reality, just like in Cartarescu`s book, the emperor Tewodros` reign came to an end after the confrontation with Robert Naipier in the British war campaign against Abyssinia in 1868. What has happened to the unreliable narrator from a letter of Ioan Ghica to Alecsandri? This book continues the ethos of ”Levantul“ and turns it into a novel. Just where is the author disguised? Since the first person narrative seems to belong to providence in this book, where does the author hide? The tone of the novel is told in the second person singular, as a way to counterplay the stave of memory and to turn its game into new orders, impulses and chaos.

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