Excerpt from

Critics about

novel, "Prose" series, Cartea Romānească, 2007, 264 pages, format 130 x 200 mm

Copyright: Polirom

Translation rights sold to: Editions Non Lieu (France)

Book presentation

This is a spectacular volume of experimental prose, entirely consecrated to love or, more generally, the mysterious relationships between women and men. The erotic fantasy in the book is matchless, but is nonetheless akin to that of the author’s previous novel, Tricephalos. Taboos are attacked one by one, in order to undertake a detailed investigation of the psychology of intimacy. It is a book that is principally about men, within an explosive kaleidoscope achieved by a ludic, sensual and expressive feminine sensibility.
The Birth of Liquid Desires is one of Ruxandra Cesereanu’s best volumes of prose to date: it has the most meticulously supervised construction (with symmetries and correspondences between the component passages of prose); it enjoys thematic coherence and engages in a deep sounding of interior landscapes.
The volume opens with a text (The Birth of Liquid Desires) that takes passionate love as its theme, as experienced in absence or unrequitedness. Employing the epistolary convention, the tale provides a highly nuanced rendering of the experiences of hopeless love, capturing a divers range of mental states (from enthusiasm to repulsion, from fascination to hatred). The following prose piece, entitled The Touch, attempts to navigate to the centre of erotic fantasy, along a nightmarish and convoluted course. The third text, The Pearl and Other Snail’s Horns, is, in fact, a long and dense prose poem, on the theme of another incompatibility that love attempts to surmount: incest. However, it is not the taboo that is crucial here, but rather the pretext to investigate (in the form of a confession) the most obscure limits of desire and intimacy.
The second part of the book, Post-males, unfolds a kaleidoscope of masculine images, as they are retained by a capricious, ludic, sensual and – most importantly – expressive feminine memory. The one hundred and seven portraits of men are just as many masculine characters, moralities, and physiognomies, treated with lucidity and precision.
Finally, after an autobiographical and self-ironic postscript, there is a pseudo-questionnaire, containing questions addressed both to women – What is a man? – and to men – What does it mean to be a man? Constructed with much imagination, the answers manage to create a new and piquant gallery of masculine portraits, from the perspective of both camps.

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