A Spider's History of Love

Before becoming the most important Romanian novelist of his generation, Mircea C?rt?rescu wrote poetry influenced by the "hallucinatory imagery" of Allen Ginsberg and distinguished by its Beat sensibility and humor. C?rt?rescu was in his twenties in the 80s, and his word-slinging poems, with references to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, remain subversive gestures under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceau?escu: "The West opened my eyes." A young man "overwhelmed by loneliness," charged with erotic, urban energy, and besotted with Natalie Wood, he observed the anonymous women on bicycles and at tram stops with "my hundred thousand eyes, crematoria windows of sparks, [which] set the fir trees ablaze and leave the mountain bald." Brimming with adolescent yearning, self-consciously "complicated," and unwilling to silence themselves, C?rt?rescu's poems convey the nervous vibrancy of the younger generation living immediately before and after the fall of communism.