The novel Occult Beds emerged during the first lockdown, in a space suspended between an empty street seen from the window and a library behind my back. In such a space, it is difficult to avoid the large ontological questions—essential in adolescence, embarrassing in old age.
At that moment, I remembered several earlier encounters with such questions, from my childhood discovery of a hidden room filled with old shoes—an image that persisted like a thorn in the eye—to Căpriceanu, a recurring character in my writing. He is a kind of moral trash bin, into which I have thrown, over time, everything I found disturbing or unbearable.
Whenever I reach Căpriceanu, it means the end of something: a mental weekend in which you do not want to get out of bed, even though the mind keeps working. From this inertia, paths always open—clear, luminous, easy to follow. Căpriceanu is my answer to capital questions; as a character, he functions as a scapegoat, a way of redeeming metaphysical guilt, to paraphrase Karl Jaspers.
Around him the entire story is built. He makes Occult Beds possible, but he also makes possible the meeting between two literature students, the novel’s protagonists. Because of him, the narrative fractures into multiple stories—because every fiction is made of a contextual epic through which a vertebral thread snakes its way.
Occult Beds is not a single story, but a wrapping of stories. One of them—the love story of Pipica and Valache—forms the lighter side of the novel’s ending.
Valache, an Aromanian wanderer, arrives in Bucharest and becomes a maker of beds. His life is affected by the impetuosity of a man obsessed with being considered a genius. If his love story were to continue, it would not be written in letters, but carved into the headboard of a bed—with petals, symbolically scattered, blurred at the edges.
Obsessive bonds often arise from incidents occurring at a global level. This is how it happens in the novel, and how it happens in the world.
Occult Beds is also a novel about books, about the destiny of literature, about the collapse of the society we thought we knew.
The chain of concessions, the manipulation of opinion, the replacement of aesthetics with raw information—all these have contributed to the decline of literature. Simply recounting lived events, narrating an episode, or pastiching fashionable books has nothing to do with literary art.
The novel constructs an epic trajectory between Lev’s chest of bibliophile editions and Flori’s virtual library—fragmentary, hurried, pragmatic, yet functional. The mutation we are undergoing today is located in the realm of imagination. Saturated with information, we search for symbolic connections. Hence the growing success of the fantastic, at the expense of traditional realism.
As for the writer–publisher relationship: it has long since dissolved. Today it is mostly temporary, often opportunistic. We no longer speak of editors devoted to a writer until death, or writers faithful to a single editor. Books appear online, at publishing houses founded for a single title. We can now speak of writer-editors—often writers who became editors in order to publish themselves. With a few exceptions, many important publishing houses belong to writers who publish their own books and those of their friends, surrounded by a gallery of figurants.
The pandemic intensified a shift that was already underway. Many writers used this time to write, and valuable books appeared—especially non-fiction. At the same time, there has been a clear turn toward the visual: filmed readings, live discussions, cultural content dispersed on social media.
Culture no longer means only books piled upon books or conferences overflowing with words. Minor creative acts, artistic sharing of information, heightened interest in history and folklore—these are symptoms of transition, repetitive gestures placed between eras.
Readers have already taken on multiple roles: influencers, judges, collectors of quotes, storytellers of what they have read. In all cases, reading remains an act of communication. This is why professional criticism has faded. Reading continues as a prelude to a vast symposium—online, polyphonic, and inevitable.
