I read “Foreign beautiful”, the Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu, one of the most celebrated (and fun) writers of recent years. In one of his stories, the protagonist is forced to spend an entire day at the Central Police post-Ceausescu Bucharest-a pretty bleak place and certainly absurd, and the author can not think of better idea to compare the characters that meets his hero “talkative caterpillars and smiling cats” from “Alice in Wonderland”. Impress a book as contemporary and closely linked to the Romanian idiosyncrasy that cite the classic Lewis Carroll, published in England on 24 May 1865. On second thought, maybe not so impressive: despite being the product of a Victorian sensibilities, Alicia has managed to become a kind of archetypal figure, held directly or obliquely by several of the most influential artists of the contemporary world because of its humorous, poetic and crazy universe.
But what makes Alice an archetype, a symbol that crosses times and places? Among other things, the fact that everyone can name it to exemplify the willingness to seek coherence in a world in which everything is determined to be inconsistent. So Alice is Romanian as Cărtărescu. And that’s also the case with Peruvian and canned tuna. You have to read “Alice in Wonderland” because it is one of the best books published in the nineteenth century. In fact, it’s great nineteenth-century book on the world of dreams, as is “The process” of Kafka, in the twentieth. The comparison, however, deserves a demarcation: if Joseph K of “process” is a character always on the verge of despair, surrendered to the bureaucracy of nonsense, Alicia is the embodiment of wisdom, courage and joy of life . While we live in Kafka’s nightmare, that is, destroys fantasy; Alicia inhabit the dream, that is, building fantasy. The animals with which she is after falling into the rabbit hole are domestic pets or insects disrupted in different versions of adulthood: imposed prohibitions and orders that they are unable to meet. Are not we always slightly and perhaps adults? Alicia discovers and understands. And grows.
A boat ride
No less charming, on the other hand, one of the masterpieces of world literature is also one novella (humorous and fantastic) for children; it is almost a cachetadón the solemnity and the petulance of writers bigwigs. But step back a bit and think about the genesis of Alicia, which is kind of surprising myth: the evening of July 4, 1862, Charles Dodgson, a neurotic stuttering priest who taught mathematics at Oxford, invited three girls Liddell take a boat ride. Dodgson was improvised, as always, a story for small audience, then took tea watching the sunset. The wonderful thing is that on that occasion the narrator was more in vein than ever; also he was building the story with comments and questions from the girls themselves. It was incredible. So much so that one Alice, who was 10 years and inspired history; certainly was the favorite of the cleric asked for something unusual: to write the story. About three months after I finished and published Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll in 1865. If this little anecdote is memorable, as the poet WH Auden wrote, is because it reveals an extremely rare human being: “A man of genius, about his genius, driving without any selfishness. “
For my part, I can not stop thinking about the amount of stories that Dodgson must have improvised later to other girls (did not like children The considered dirty and dazed), without leaving any record, just because there was no longer a small, vivacious Alicia asked him, stubbornly and tenderness, to write the story.
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