He began to write a new novel. Not about Theodoros, but to him. Page after page, in a script that grew increasingly angular, increasingly resembling the uncials of the 9th century. The words were Romanian, but the syntax was Greek—a Greek that predated Homer, a language of pure prepositions, of relations without relata. His wife, Iona, found him at dawn, his mouth full of crushed moth wings, muttering the same phrase: “Theodoros, theodoros, the odor of the rose of the world.”
He is a worm , Cărtărescu thought, waking in his armchair, a half-drunk glass of ouzo sweating on the side table. A worm chewing through the apple of my brain. mircea cartarescu theodoros