Talking about his formative years as a writer, Adrian Schiop considers that switching from one system to another had a crucial impact on his writing: \u201cI consciously passed through three systems: Ceausescu\u2019s fading socialism, the \u2018anarchism\u2019 of the 1990s and the tame neoliberalism after the EU integration. My writing is a kind of psychotherapy by means of which I\u2019m trying to understand what was happening to me during those crazy years; the transition period is my Freudian shadow.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
What did you aim to discuss in \u201cSolda\u021bii\u201d? What drove you?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
I wanted to somehow get a grip on the time spent in Ferentari, say things nobody had said yet and etch a description of its society. I lived in Ferentari, I didn\u2019t quite know what I got from it and it seemed like a shame to \u201ccapitalize\u201d the experience only in a PhD dissertation. The academic discourse doesn\u2019t suit me, I find it much more difficult to engage in it. You need to have references, you can\u2019t speculate too much. And I had ideas which I couldn\u2019t fully argue, but I had a gut feeling that\u2019s how things were. This was what I wanted to show. Besides, my topic was the manea<\/i> (turbo-folk) and I had loads of observations which had nothing to do with that and I couldn\u2019t use them. Living there, I came to know about other things: what the thugs got up to, how they interacted and how they saw outsiders.<\/p>\n
So it wasn\u2019t primarily the love story?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
No, no, it was the love story. And I thought the topic was worth writing about. […] I wanted to come with a grassroots perspective. And give an account of society as a whole. This was what drove me, beyond Ferentari: to show that somehow those people were not that different; that the whole of Romanian society was \u201cnew money\u201d. It\u2019s not only they who are caught up in this \u2013 making heaps of money \u2013 but the entire Romanian society is after money. Just like the whole bragging thing. In fact, all Romanians are now centered on showing off, conspicuous consumption and in-your-face display, except they take different forms, more hypocritical ones. I mean, in the rest of society, the middle class, things happen in a more subtle way \u2013 people show off in such a way as to avoid looking like show-offs. […]<\/p>\n
As a gay man, do you feel the pressure to be more masculine, more macho?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Yeah, you do, it\u2019s somehow… There\u2019s a sort of masculinity complex in gay environments. First of all, it\u2019s how society sees you, like a sort of woman in disguise. Second of all, maybe you identify more easily with the image of women (without necessarily being into the whole drag thing or whatever) and all this leads you to somehow think \u201cI gotta be a man, what the hell? So what if I fuck other men? Can\u2019t I be a man? I can\u2019t be a proper man if I fuck other men?\u201d There is a sort of masculinity complex within the culture, as well. I mean, if you\u2019re too effeminate, it\u2019s harder to find a date than if you were more macho. So many play the macho card, especially after a certain age. When you\u2019re young and handsome, it\u2019s easier to be more girlish, but after a certain age, you\u2019re just physically unable to pull it off anymore. And it\u2019s a world where physical appearance matters a lot. I feel it\u2019s a lot tougher than in the straight world, where people get married, have kids and it doesn\u2019t matter anymore, you can get fat, you can… When you have no family, no nothing, you have to be fit all the time and look young. If you start losing your touch, you try to compensate by acting more macho. But beyond this, there still is a sort of macho complex which I also have and I think many in this world have. And I tried to get over this complex in the novel and said \u201cFuck it, my character is gonna be passive.\u201d […]<\/p>\n
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