Klara’s Universe

Reading
I love reading since… since I learned how to read I guess. I first started reading Romanian folk tales and literature and then little by little I moved to French adventure literature and other domains of the universal literature thesaurus. I still remember that one of my first favorite books was a book on Greek mythology, that I would read over and over during my elementary school years and never get enough of it. Then, as a junior high student, I really fell in love with French literature. I started reading Alexandre Dumas, Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, in a word most of the classics. However, my favorite lecture turned out to be not a famous French adventure novel, but a Nobel prize winning novel on the beginnings of Christianity: Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz. It is not only the impressive narrative power of depicting and resurrecting a now gone era, the atmosphere and conviction of the early Christian world, the convincingly shaking scenes of martyrdom that made me love it. Most of all, I cherished the incredible force and depth with which Sienkiewicz built and thoroughly analysed the mind and soul of a man who, like Saint Paul becomes from prosecutor, a believer. It is precisely this psychological dimension of the novel that moved me the most and in fact, makes me hold Sinkiewicz as one of the best writers of the 20th century. As I became a senior high school student, I already decided my goal to become a writer and follow, in any case, a literature-connected career in life. It was also the period when I would voraciously swallow book after book, from Edgar Allan Poe to Omar Khayyam, from Baudelaire to Kalidasa and from Virginia Woolf to Yasunari Kawabata. It was of course one of the happiest periods of my life, and looking back, I now believe that it is not friends, school or love that made it so, but the endless nights spent with a lighter under my blanket, transposing myself into a totally different, better and incredible world that I would carry locked inside me forever, from the moment I turned the last page.

 Traveling
I believe that the taste for traveling takes it roots into the passion for reading. Or at least, they are both effects of a same cause: the thirst for knowledge, for transcendence. As a girl who was born and raised into an Eastern European country, I always envisaged traveling abroad as an incredibly exotic, unreachable luxury. My first visit abroad was when I was 16 and I went to France as part of an exchange program. Needless to say, as a lover of French literature, France has always been the country I wanted to visit most in this world and this trip turned out to be the fulfillment of my most arduous dreams. I visited the famous castles from the Loire Valley and of course, Paris! France turned out to be exactly as I imagined it and so much more. It was, by all means, the voyage of my making as a young girl and a young artist. Once I gained the scholarship offered by the Japanese government and moved to Japan, my horizons became incommensurably wider, offering me the possibility to visit places I didn’t even dare to dream about before. But no matter how much I fell in love with Asia and its overwhelming scenery and exotic traditions, France still occupies a special place in my heart, much like a first love that even once gone, continues to linger in your blood throughout your lifetime, like a tear-proof stigmata. And may u call me old-fashioned and over-romantic, or a cliché-fed European, but I do believe Paris is the most beautiful city in the world and the only foreign city in which I would like to actually live one day.