ROMAN

excerpt I was to deal with this vague feeling, this bizarre, somewhat abstract and pure love three times during my teenage years. I had come into this huge and empty room, lured by some strange music that I always found irresistible, insinuating, intoxicating and dangerous.

N. Manolescu promised somewhere an inventory of places where the characters in Romanian literature make love. The critic was surprised by the parsimonious frequentation of the conjugal bed, and the preference for more bucolic spots: the oven, the meadow, the haystack…

ArgumentI have always regretted the lack of raw erotic detail in the most remarkable works of fiction. This frustration is by no means compensated for by the high availability of lurid, pornographic books. When reading fiction, I do not look for arousal, but for precision.

excerpt When I first met her, she said she adored Pablo Neruda's poetry and La Fontaine's erotic fables, which are un petit secret délicieux and, once a month, she would listen to a fragment of Le Petit Prince, interpreted by Gérard Philippe. She also told me

Bertrand had descended on our little town as if from a film: long-haired, with a beard that was still fluffy but nevertheless impressive in comparison with our teenage fuzz, and dressed in a T-shirt with Che Guevara on it. Besides, he was smoking Gauloises and was an anarchist.

Dies estexcerptsHe would kiss her and caress her breasts clutching them (as if her breasts were mere rubber balls), and he couldn't figure out just how much cheap male instinct, and how much true passion, was hiding behind his gestures. Those were the gestures of a

excerpt The following days, Mioara took the girls for a walk in Chishmigiu Park and treated them on a boat ride (the driver of the black car had rolled up his sleeves and was rowing across the lake, giving the ladies nice smiles from under his pointed moustache). Later

Years ago, I experienced a peculiar evening. My life is far from eventful, and the few significant occurrences I do remember have been sucked for all they're worth in my books. There are, nevertheless, among their number some which, for a variety of reasons, I couldn't

I lived in Amsterdam for a while, it now feels like a different lifetime, perched in the attic of a Flemish house along Watergraafsmeer. The rest of the three-storey building accommodated the owner, a lady of Polish descent, and her rubicund daughter. They would have a bath

excerpts  I passed the entrance exam in philology at Cluj, but I was already bored after my freshman year. I had the best results in my class, but that was not my place. Whenever I danced at parties, and I felt the boys' knees splitting my legs through my dress, my

excerpts 30. The ass and the airCane and Tolstoi on the train. They talked about the status of the writer in society, how good it was during communism when writers were given cars, villas and fat paychecks. Of course you would keep on writing; today you write and everyone's

I don't know what pornography has come to mean today, but I know what pornography is not. I recently saw the horrid TV broadcast against Ovidiu Verdes's book, the whole pathetic setup designed to compromise an author. I consider Musics and Tricks as one of the