The 3 best books by Mircea Cartarescu

The metamorphosis of the poet into a prose writer always supposes a literary sublimation. The descriptions, the rhythm, any type of trope ..., form and background win when the soul of the poet remains in that latency under the narrator on duty.

Cartarescu is essentially that poet, a Romanian writer who has become the brilliant replacement of cioran, perhaps not so much in its most direct tragic vision but yes, and even more fortunately, in its handling of the meta-literary with anthropological will. A kind of mix between Milan Kundera y Murakami, only even more determined to bring out human distortions with a disconcerting fantasy touch.

In other words, in his exuberant mastery of writing, he presents us with stories plagued with estrangement, alienation, deformity, and atrocious visions of what remains of us in a common space between our dreams and social guidelines.

Common space, yes, the place where Cartarescu presents his universe, his new dimension, his stage that we can access to represent the absurd replica of the existence that seems to always be one, only full of nuances and enriched thanks to the capable writer to rescue everything.

Although fictional narrative is not the only field in which Cartarescu stands out, also capable of great essays, we only delve into his novelistic side to choose the best.

Top 3 recommended books by Mircea Cartarescu

Solenoid

800 pages in which the real and the dreamlike fight to occupy the reader's perception, ending up leaving you speechless in front of an almost circus display of impossible balances of the depth of the message from the disconcerting.

A declaration of intent by Cartarescu in what is undoubtedly his most ambitious work. There will be something from the author's most intimate universe projected onto the writer that capitalizes on the focus of the plot. Even more so when the setting is a Bucharest of the writer's past and present. Bizarre characters pivot around the writer who point at times to a fantastic literature, redirected the next moment with a return to reality that transforms the fantastic into grotesque, into hurtful metaphors, into crude visions of the world.

The writer in question is a Romanian teacher at a neighborhood high school, with a failed literary career and a profession that does not interest him, buys an old boat-shaped house, built by the inventor of a solenoid, which houses strange machinery : a dentist chair with a control panel. Soon he becomes intimate with a teacher who has been captured by a mystical sect, that of the picketers, who organize nocturnal demonstrations in the cemeteries of the city and in the Morgue. Meanwhile, the narrator faces hallucinations that reveal the truth of his existence.

Solenoid is the touchstone around which the rest of Cărtărescu's fictions gravitate. A work that attracts all the clues, themes, and literary obsessions of a brilliant author who has gradually become a cult writer: brilliance, madness and greatness. The latest and most mature novel by the Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu, one of the most powerful current European writers, in a work that has led him to be compared to Pynchon, Kafka and Kundera.

Solenoid

The left wing. blinder 1

The Orbitor trilogy, or Blinding as it has been called in Spain, begins with this novel that delves first into that very special fantasy of Cartarescu, a spiral imaginary, with countless doors to enter and exit from one world to another.

Because imagination and reality are communicating vessels of our always subjective becoming. And Cartarescu knows that and the presentation of his plots pivots on that idea, always capable of taking us from one side to the other, as if he were, mainly, the connoisseur of the vanishing points between the two planes of our existence. Visceral exercise in literary self-exploration about feminine nature and the mother, a fictional journey through the geography of a hallucinated city, a Bucharest that becomes the scene of world history, «The left wing»Has become one of the strongest successes in European literature today, and a literary best seller from the moment it was published.

Wandering circuses, Securitate agents, gypsies addicted to the poppy flower, a dark sect, the Knowers, who control everything visible and invisible, an army of the living dead and a host of Byzantine angels sent to combat them, an illuminated albino that cheats death, underground jazz in a dreamed New Orleans, the irruption of communism in Romania... Hidden passages, fascinating tapestries, gigantic butterflies, a mystical exodus to the author's childhood and the prehistory of his family. A kaleidoscopic world from which we emerge as if we were returning from a pilgrimage, moved and transformed.

The left wing

Nostalgia

One of the first volumes that collect Cartarescu's nascent prose. A work impregnated with strands of the poet's chrysalis that assaults the world of prose. The short narrative always being seen as a younger sister of the novel, however, the emergence of this work meant that immediate detection of the great work to be projected.

The volume, of a prodigious quality, opens with "The Roulette Player", which tells the unlikely story of a man who has never been lucky enough, but who, surprisingly, makes his fortune participating in lethal Russian roulette sessions. In "El Mendébil", an impudent messiah with proustian airs loses his magical powers with the advent of his own sexuality, and is persecuted by a legion of young acolytes.

In "The Twins", Cartarescu indulges in the bizarre exploration of youthful anger, leading to the book's centerpiece, "REM," which tells the story of Nana, a middle-aged woman in love with a high school student. in a nightmarish, encyclopedic Bucharest that rises to the category of universal city. A surprising, aphrodisiac and literary narrative tour de force, by the hand of one of the greatest figures of contemporary European letters.

Nostalgia

Other recommended novels by Mircea Cartarescu

The right wing. blinder 3

"It was the year of the Lord, 1989. People heard about wars and riots, but they were not scared, because these things had to happen." The Right Wing is the third installment in the Blinder trilogy. We are in the last year of man on Earth, the year of the Revolution. Ceausescu's dictatorship is experiencing its death rattles, and in the circuses of hunger, queues of women wait for the food that does not arrive.

Bucharest is a city of the dead and at night, of ruins and misery. The young Mircea struggles between hallucinated visions of a city that appears at the end of the world, embarking on a wild and mystical dissection of early childhood, on an oneiric journey through the labyrinth of family genealogy, in which everything converges and everything ends in a fullness as fleeting as the throb of a butterfly's wing.

The right wing, blinder 3
5/5 - (14 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.