A few days ago I reread the Libris.ro article Writers to Infinity, dedicated to authors born in February. I loved its playful and free tone, but also the way it searches for threads of kinship between very different writers, united only by their birth month, around which an entire mythology has formed. Hence the idea that it favors imagination and restlessness.
Perhaps Aquarians truly feel the call of water. I have always felt it myself — from the river that cuts the world in Ferenike to the Dâmbovița River in the Phanariot trilogy.
Water is, for me, a living character, a spirit that separates and unites, bringing revelations and illusions. It is the place where fairies sleep. February always reminds me of an old fairy tale about the fairy Sticlișoara, asleep in the secret chamber where the fountain of youth lies. She presides over water, yet she is also its double — a kind of daena, the astral counterpart of the being at the bottom of the well. The fairy’s sleep is magnetic — the secret message of eternity, a call from beyond death that slips into my February dreams.
Reading the Libris article, I rediscovered among the writers mentioned there a whole family of affinities and remembered moments of my own encounters with them.
I feel kinship with James Joyce, my model since my student years, through linguistic imagination and the epic gallery of every word. I share with Chuck Palahniuk a fascination for the bizarre, and with Michel Houellebecq a poetics of territory — the mental spaces where characters lose and redefine themselves. I even found myself alongside him in a literary ranking: Magyar Nemzet compiled a list of the most important books published in Hungary in 2015, where Lizoanca at Eleven appears next to well-known writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Attila Bartis, György Dragomán and Noémi Kiss.
But what truly connects me to writers born in February is a certain kind of observation, like that of Toni Morrison — a dreaminess typical of beings born under snow. I also feel close to the distilled dramatic force of Ryū Murakami. Among Romanian writers, I most often rediscover Caragiale in the land of unseen catastrophes, where my fairy never sleeps but pours everything she sees into my mind, expecting me to praise her lucidity.
I believe there is an aquatic philosophy, a perpetual curiosity — and a small fairy sleeping by the waters.
Mid-February especially feels like a time of searching. Aquarians live between two shores — and perhaps that is why their literature always seeks bridges between dream and lucidity, between memory and hallucination, between visceral reality and boundless imagination.
I wrote about this “fraternity of those born under snow” starting from a longer article published on Libris.ro, dedicated to writers born in February.
📖 You can read the full article here:
Libris.ro – Writers to Infinity, February 2022
Updated in February 2026.
