Why We Love Women

Cartarescu brings together twenty short stories that he wrote for ELLE magazine. The protagonist of every story is female, but they are not individual portraits of women - it is a group portrait of womanhood. The implied question to which the title 'Why We Love Women' introduces a series of narrative answers is not Why do you love women but Why do we love women The we refers not to men in general but to the multiple biographical selves and literary personae of Mircea Cartarescu, spanning early childhood, youth and manhood in the closed world of communist Romania and mature adulthood and middle age in a post-communist world of free travel and encounters between cultures (the book s settings include San Francisco, Ireland, Amsterdam, Turin, Paris and Krakow). The women of the title are real, imaginary, fictional, fictionalised, literary, intertextual, fantastical, oneiric, ideal, historical, contemporary, tragic, burlesque, mysterious, ordinary, strange, familiar, exotic, homely, perfect, flawed, ethereal, mundane, sacred and profane, each uniquely individual and at the same time universal in her beauty. Even when at their most (seemingly) biographical, the stories and articles of 'Why We Love Women' are self-consciously literary, intertextual and self-reflexive. In the first story, the epiphany of ineffable female beauty triggered by the young African woman on the subway from Berkeley to San Francisco is framed and introduced in terms of what J. D. Salinger calls in 'The Laughing Man' unclassifiably great beauty at first sight . Cartarescu's literary influences are modern and American; his reference point for the revelation of absolute, ineffable female beauty is not Dante's Beatrice but Salinger's Mary Hudson. But the woman herself seems to transcend all times and cultures: she is African and ancient Egyptian, wearing an Indian sari, her anklet inscribed in Arabic, and the snaking threads of her Walkman earphones are like an artefact from the dawn of time