Beliefs

"The worst of this group of saints, martyrs, angels, archangels, and other imaginary creatures seems to be an individual named Jesus Christ, who never existed but in spite of this fact did many things he should not have. He said:"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," in other words, he was in favor of man's exploitation of man. He was in favor of adultery ("that means your daddies leave their wives and run around like idiots after other women"), since he didn't do anything about the loose woman who was caught committing adultery. They say he was born of a virgin, that means a pure woman, you see, but that is what shows Jesus Christ is a myth, the opiate of the people, because other false saints and gods appeared to be born from virgins. "In fact, children, let me tell you what happened, what a professor of philosophy taught us during training: Jesus's mom got into trouble with one Pantera, a Roman soldier, and when she ended up pregnant, she had to get married quickly, and to someone dumb enough to take her like that, so she got Joseph, the village carpenter." Still, they must remember — in spite of all these stories — that none of those people ever existed, not Mary or Joseph or their kid born in a feed trough, no more than Father Christmas (only Father Frost existed, who came to school every year with a bag of cookies and moldy oranges), or Muma of the Forrest of fairies. Yuri Gagarin had been to space, that is, to heaven, and he didn't see any gods or saints of any kind."

Mircea Cărtărescu, in Solenoid

The library...

"The school library is also a detention hall. A narrow cement staircase next to the nurse's office leads far below the earth, like the public toilets in an old train station. The librarian is the math teacher, who, since she has diabetes, teaches only part-time and spends a few hours on guard duty. She is wide, she spans the width of the table in the little entryway, and her face is full of warts. The children barely have room to pass the barbarian idol who blocks the entrance. On her rough wood desk covered in red ink doodles, she keeps a jar of cloudy liquid. Inside are her algae. She uses them to treat not only her diabetes but also her vision, bladder, bowel movements, ovarian cysts, memory, snoring, warts, indigestion, and boredom. Her algae are the panacea humanity has been waiting for, the revelation of a Russian scientist named Naumov. They appeared in the school a few months ago, introduced by Mrs. Bernini, the music teacher. Her mystical jar shone in the sun like the holy grail. There were a few palid, translucent creatures inside, with delicate internal anatomies, floating in a hyaline liquid that resembled sperm. [...] The library has no books. There were at one time hundreds of children's books, but the damp underground air has covered them with mold. The covers are now rotten, stained green, and smelling like penicillin, and their pages teem with minuscule scorpions that have no stingers. Most of the old books lie, piled with dust, on rotting shelves."

Mircea Cărtărescu, in Solenoid