Why should one dare to build a trilogy at the threshold between the second and the third millennia? When people read less and less and the microtext marches in triumph? Could be a maniacal, an overwhelming impulse or a try to systematise the themes and motifs approached in previous writings? I am very little inclined to think of some other explanations, for instance of seducing the various categories of readers. We could envisage a strategy of this kind in the case of Marin Preda's novel Cel mai iubit dintre pǎmânteni (The Most Beloved of Humans). The intention of captatio was obvious there, the plot being developed with the view of reaching the climax. As for Nicolae Breban and Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, if they have something in common, this would be the pleasure of flying high above the intermediary reader with the purpose of landing on the highest peak, where the depopulated ranks of an elite are looking forward to welcoming them. Cǎrtǎrescu puts it explicitly: "A book was a sieve in the end, a mechanism, a succession of grids and tests more and more difficult, so that the hoard of readers entering the first great room should get lost" . More permissive with his readers, he published his trilogy Orbitor (Blinding) in steps, at Humanitas Publishing House in Bucharest: The Left Wing (1996), The Body (2002) and The Right Wing (2007). As to Breban, he proves to be merciless, offering all of a sudden his trilogy Amphitryon: The Lesser Demons, The Procurators and Alberta, all being issued at Du Style Publishing House in 2004 at Bucharest.

Obsessions, Pirouettes and Polishings

Resuming the topic of intentionality, I notice that both trilogists make use of topoi, leit-motifs that could be found in some other texts of them. Breban retakes into consideration, with minimum changes, the tense meeting between man and woman, that prowl and seduction specific to the new representatives of the system or to those banned from power. The much discussed nietzscheanism is projected in sensual gatherings, the fighters being, as a matter of fact, disguised Don Juans: "the hidden don juans, those who allow themselves to be conquered instead of conquering, those who provoke the conquering, who like to be chased" . This explains the desperate try of Marchievici, the lawyer, to be admitted into Alberta's saloon-flat or between those taking a walk along the centre of the city: "that saloon-street, institution-street, history-street, system, closed circle, arena, existence-street, carnival-street" . The absorption into the background is more difficult for the elevated individual. The milieu can repel through ignorance, so that Marchievici's confusion ("Am I invisible for real?") is normal. Basically, the brebanian male hero is not to be found either at the pole where the grande bourgeoisie is grouped or at the one assumed by the petite bourgeoisie. Neither in Alberta's flat, "almost a Chekhovian saloon", attended by a swarm of characters organized depending on their home responsibilities, or along the boulevard seized by the balkanik crowd. The noble Marchievici feels like an intruder, envious on the others "impertinence of living", touching their "psychological skin". The conclusion gets blatant: "Who doesn't exist strives incessantly to exist!"  The intruder tries, prowls. These subtle or primitive Don Juans consider each other and are afraid of women. The complex of inferiority is turned into a complex of superiority, but the schopenhauerian anxiety persists.

Nicolae Breban is extremely proud of the women types he created in his novels. I am not sure his attitude is justified. Turning around "the statue-column-woman" or around the faulknerian one, upon whom "a passing oligophrenia"  was inflicted, he envisages "a disquieting, metallic beauty, as it is that of lunatics" . The inner side is not actually visited, no matter how intensely would discuss the opposite sexes. The male follows dizzily a martial woman or, conversely, the woman appears as a sort of poodle accompanying the experienced and condescending man. The womanhood is valued through the eyes of a lofty masculinity; the excessive, weird and imposing femininity oppresses and anticipates the masculine failure. A confrontation of perspectives again.

Cǎrtǎrescu reorganises his obsessions too. No matter if we read about the elevator gliding from one floor to another, about a subtle but firmly structured world, about the huge butterflies hibernating under ice or about the one that stretches its wings on the mother's thigh. All these are already recorded images. The same happens to the mother's handbag, to the Mendelebil, to the esoteric tattoos, to the parades with allegorical carts along Bucharest's avenues. Leaning his legs against the hot or cold - depending on the season - heater in his room above the city, the narrator mirrors himself in the reality: "I am watching Bucharest through my triple window as through a baroque painting" . The arch-theme of Orbitor consists of exfoliating the mystical, dantesque, Halimà-like and sensuous rose, sacred and perversely refined in the same time: "Folds in folds, as a rose, as a vulva" . But the rose is a labyrinth, too, and every one of its petals is a palimpsest endlessly readable by erasing it: "looking at itself, the rose gets, exactly owing to this, new petals, that have to be looked at, too, with renewed eyes, as if the mirific flower grew on an optic nerve and we could distinguish the invisible through it" . What matters is the decoding intention, wherefrom the necessity of strictly selecting the readers. Author, narrator and reader heavily support the deciphering of the hieroglyph emerged on the cube-carpet woven by the medium-mother and interrogated by the Security forces on account of disclosing some geo-political and military secrets in her tapestries. Secret and fabulous maps are not only the carpets woven in apartments, but either the multi-coloured tattoo done by Herman on the skull of a little girl, Anca. After many years, Mircea will shave the skull bearing the palimpsest and will see his face imprinted there. More than this, every component of his face is composed of stitches picturing catastrophes or narrating zoomed out events. The vision per specula in enigmate allows the decomposition of the great whole into smaller wholes, as the mega-system is formed of subordinate systems: "to ignore the rest of the drawing and focus only on a detail of the initial detail and then on a detail of the detail of a detail".