“Theodoros” by Mircea Cartărescu, double king of kings – Libération

Abyssinia in a postmodernist and fabulously romantic version by the Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu.

It began in 1818 under a wool blanket, in the south of present-day Romania, to decipher the Romance of Alexanderand it ended fifty years later in front of a hostile army, a copper revolver stuck in its mouth: the life of Tewodros II, king of kings of Ethiopia, monarch among the most decisive on the path from Abyssinia to modernity. Or rather the very immaterial, and fabulously romantic, version that the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu weaves over nearly 600 – prodigious – pages based on a vague pseudo-historical theory. Said the “final note” of Théodoros : “The character in my novel really existed. We discover his early years in Letters to Vasile Alecsandri that the memorialist Ion Ghica [homme politique et écrivain, ndr] published in 1884. In his text, the author makes the supposition, based on a letter to Queen Victoria preserved in the British archives, that the young servant who disappeared in his father’s domain would have become, after a few decades of adventures nebulae, Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia. This idea has no real historical basis, but opens the fascinating perspective of an imagined, fictional, mythical, archetypal history.