Eveniment. Cronică literară
Event. Literary Chronicle

Summary/Abstract: Cristina Timar compares in her essay three short-stories on the theme of love, more precisely love for an unfaithful woman, belonging to three different writers – Alberto Moravia (”How can you live with an unfaithful woman”), Alexandru Vlad (”Pas de deux”) and Mircea Cărtărescu (”The Twins”). The first two have more similarities regarding characters, relationship in the couple, husbands’ attitudes towards their unfaithful wives and artistic vision – love seen as a degraded value in our contemporary world, happiness in couple seeming fairly impossible. Mircea Cărtărescu’s short-story is more complex and subordinates the theme of love to the theme of the androgen, as a final attempt to reunite the masculine and feminine into one being, which will prove to be a complete failure. The two teenage-characters, Andrei and Gina, manage to transcend the body barriers when they first make love. When they separate from the embrace, they realize they exchanged bodies, but kept the former consciousness. Unable to accept their new existential condition, they commit suicide, first Gina, and a couple of months later, Andrei, but not before writing a long confession. The myth of the androgen proves to be a failure, while the myth of writing/writer seems to rise from its ruins.

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