In so-called communist Romania, chess was held in high esteem, even if our champions were weaker than the Soviets. This game, this sport of the mind, was at the time a better way to establish your reputation than literature.

We don't recount our dreams we construct them with the materials of reality. We aren't looking for God, psychic truth or authenticity, but for esthetic effect. That's why I baptized our movement Structural, or Esthetic, Onirism. Dreams and music were our models.

Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests.

The reader's impression is one of a dream - the only thing that's left upon waking is the memory of a melody at the end of a concert.

But music doesn't sum up my approach to literature - even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To 'fugue' I had to invent 'trap-words,' or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew.

Chess hasn't really influenced my literature. It's true, there's a character in Pigeon Post, an old chess player but it's more of a wink, a self-portrait and not much more.

There is no one 'best set-up', there are many - you can get to mate in endless ways. And - don't forget! - in chess, like in literature, the other (the reader, the adversary, the partner, etc.) has to be a collaborator, has to work with you to get to the final goal. We depend on them! But they also depend on us.

Vain Art of the Fugue was the only one of my novels to be met with relative public recognition: it was nominated for the Prix Médicis by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Milan Kundera pocketed the prize instead and the public never clamored to buy it.

Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics.

The East was no longer a threat to the western world, and when there's nothing to fear we turn our backs, we look elsewhere. Eastern literature is still the poor relative that everyone wants to forget, the Cinderella who hasn't (yet) found her prince.