Cecilia atefanescu has a strange romance in store

The young fiction writer Cecilia atefanescu made her debut two years ago, in the volume "Ferestre '98," an anthology of "Cenaclul Litere." Her texts from that volume bear a comical tenderness, the author herself assuming the position of a feminine Nica, a teenager trying to understand an often neck-breaking world, a disseminated and genuinely concrete reality.

But this was only the first stage in Cecilia's creative work. She felt the need to break up with this beautiful but childish world and decided to approach, in a much more acute narrative voice, a more difficult problem, in a wider space. The idea came to her gradually. Initially, she started writing a short story, but it grew so big and the author was so happy with what she was writing, that she soon realised it would turn into a novel. Consequently, she has just finished a book on a new issue in Romanian literature: a novel of sexual pathology, a panorama of sexual deviations in the post-December Romania (as depicted by Mircea Cartarescu). Despite all appearances, the novel is not an autobiography. Of course, it includes personal experiences that shaped for the author an imaginary space, a vision of the facts, but the existential part stops here. It is, in fact, the story of unconventional love between two girls that meet during the college years and the connection between them becomes fatality. The main character will grow under the sign of unfulfilled love.

"Kiki, the girl the main character falls in love with, existed in reality, she is a friend of mine who suddenly disappeared. It was a tragic moment for me and this is the starting point of the novel. Kiki is a continuous threat to me, a challenge coming from inside me."

Cecilia changed this challenge into another, aimed at the reader, a challenge for the limited mentality that is constantly in search of safe values, both in novels and in real life. "In our world, strange people are rejected, marginalised, and this has always amazed me. I wrote this novel with great joy, I worked on it very much, and, if I think about it, I would still need another ten years to finish it. I really like it. My friends who read the manuscript helped me a lot in writing this book - I am speaking about Ioana Nicolae, Mircea Cartarescu, Sorin Ghergut, T.O. Bobe and many others - and I dedicate this book to them, I feel that somehow I wrote it for them." Even since "Ferestre '89," Cecilia atefanescu promised to be an important writer for the prose of "2000 generation," a generation for which life is an open wound, which they have no scruple in showing to the physician in its whole bleak splendour.