Daniela Zeca Buzura: I consider fiction a kind of power and another religion.

By May 4, 2018

Daniela Zeca Buzura

From: Monte Carlo Born on: 1 November 1966 Occupation: Writer, TV show producer

I wanted to meet Daniela Zeca Buzura, the charming woman who always expresses reading with intonation from the perfect book of her mind and soul. I received much more – a gift I would say. By dragging the pale pink ribbon of the box, I discover a woman who is meant to face the East and the West, to provide answers to collective anxieties and education to young journalists.

She rolled on the table a cup of coffee with traces of lipstick, in short and planned movements, like a swiss mechanism, while she said, looking in my eyes:

Care is a capital sin, my dear!

I was experiencing an optical illusion in the boating of reality.

 

MS: Do you think a person can become a famous writer only if he is capable of experiencing very strong feelings?

Yes!

I think the reason why the Romanian authors have not yet won the Nobel Prize is that for many of us literature is a sparkling, attractive game. Personally, I believe in literature that contains somewhere, subliminal, but clear as on the bottom of the water, an ethical message and not just an epic message, with others words, an assumption of generally valid and profound human experiences such as illness, old age, ephemerality, love, death, impossible happiness. I believe that for too long in Romania, especially after the establishment of communism, we have exacerbated, in the fiber of literature, either the aesthetic aspect of the bright gratuity, either the allusive and ambiguous part of the parable, leaving aside the grave simplicity of the great human problems. The last one is hard to assume, and only a few of the writers can do it.

Judging by these coordinates, the success of my novels has not always brought me only joy, because I knew there was a direct and immediate reaction to the exoticism of my text, to the unusual situations, it was there and it is a seduction started from the mystery of the Orient. Many times, I was sad that readers, in particular the women, remained in the Romantic History of a Safari or the Wind Demons, at the first two levels of writing: the glamour of the jewelers and the game of love, without discovering that in the story is an alarm or so I tried to be, on the forms of possession that overwhelm us, a warning that nothing is ours, that nothing belongs to us. Obviously, my books are also books of collective characters, because whenever two characters meets and confronts, one he and one she, their interaction is an overlap of voices, a crossing of shouts of two different civilizations and different experiences.

MS: What do you think about fiction?

I consider fiction a form of power and another religion. Writing and fiction are for me a personal religion, from which I expect all possible improvements, and if I’m afraid of something is the fact that the current technology will gradually cast the fantasy included in the fiction. And not only fantasy, little by little, as the countless possibilities that literature as an associative puzzle develops you in order to know: it takes you to a room, and then reading, inevitably if it is good literature, you want and even walk in the next room; open doors.

However, the current world teaches us to skate on surfaces, we are talking about 4D, 3D, but we have a simplified journey in 2D or something around there. A journey that has lost, without realizing, the force and diversity of the imaginary that, for example, radio and black writing on white paper, gave us.

As soon as we receive everything in fast and saturated visions, as the digital era gives us, the imaginary is atrophied, no longer circulating as it circulated, when it could leave from the unmoved by high speed technology aditional text. I do not know with what we’re going to replace this lost imaginary, because I am sure that we will replace it with something. And its prime purpose was to participate in the meaning of life, helping us to live, to launch projections, to endure, especially to endure the difficulty of being.

MS: When and where does the past has sense?

It’s easier for me to answer where it’s pointless.

Never in the great experiences, in the great love that is usually intense and flashing. In a present that is only then and there, the past has no chance. It helps us to put in order what we have assumed, but I think it hinders or contradicts us in the gestures of jumping without the net. We all know: there are times when we have to take a step with our eyes closed and listening either to our instinct or to an irrepressible inner voice. The past does not, therefore, has no place in the euphoria of our “heroism” from great love or other unpredictable and blind choices, to which we only consent a few times in a lifetime. Here I can give a single example from the inside of my lived life: If I had thought for a moment how many young people died under bullets in the first two world wars, I and so many of my generation would go out empty-handed in the street, in December ’89?

MS: What do you think a human being needs to be more complete?

The understanding at the right time of what he lives! We have an important gap between experience and understanding, and perhaps here is both the hell and splendor.