And in Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), Babitz disrupts the short story collection, as a form, by interspersing her stories with love notes to a reader who isn’t quite fictional, but isn’t quite real.

Throughout Berlin’s writing, the contrasts between short autofictions about similar but not identical events equally accentuate the fictional qualities of her work. Howland’s Blue in Chicago (1978) demonstrates that brevity brings out the constructed aspects of autofiction. This study considers the short stories of the late-twentieth-century American writers Bette Howland, Lucia Berlin and Eve Babitz – who have recently been labeled ‘autofiction writers’ – and asks what happens to the genre when it is adapted to the short form. However, shorter autofictions have existed in English for decades. It is currently enjoying a vogue in the Anglophone publishing world, where it is used almost exclusively to refer to novel-length works. What happens when autofiction meets the short form? Coined in France in the late 1970s, the term ‘autofiction’ refers to writing that blurs the boundary between fiction and fact. Cărtărescu uses hyperbole, metaphysical parody, and a maximalist surrealist imagination to propel the discussion of socialism and cultural peripherality beyond the dated parameters of the East/West dichotomies. This option is influenced by the author’s biography, as well as by his own relationship with the memory burden of socialism in today’s post-Cold War world. In order to describe this narrative structure as an emergent subgenre of the postmodern maximalist novel, we coined the term ‘maximalist autofiction.’ We then discussed Cărtărescu’s option for maximalist autofiction and the effects this literary choice has had on his representation of Romanian late socialism. The novel is an ample, paranoid, metaphysical, and counterfactual autobiography that uses a late-communist backdrop to create a metaphorically skewed representation of the self and the world. This article studies the fictionalization of late Eastern-European socialism in contemporary Romania, namely the literary projection of the 1980s in Mircea Cărtărescu’s autofictional novel Solenoid (2015).

Solenoid roman mircea cărtărescu