Blinding (Orbitor) de Mircea Cartarescu aduna rapid reactii critice favorabile: The reader is invited to embrace this feeling of overwhelming comprehension, this comprehensive vision exceeding life and imagination. As Borges said when Joyce’s Ulysses was published, this text does not aspire to be a novel, but a cathedral. — Bogdan Suceavă, Los Angeles Review of Books Blinding is a fever dream; a baroque hallucinatory journey through a labyrinth of gorgeous language and discovered meaning. It is a memoir and a collection of fantasy scenes woven tight into the Bucharest landscape — a twilight that extends through centuries...a circus of the macabre and misbegotten. I could not put it down and I was continually getting lost, in the best possible way. Cartarescu’s language, and this magisterial translation by Sean Cotter, can be compared to nothing completely, but is Joycean in it’s scope, with Ishmael Reed’s bop prosody and Thomas Pynchon’s improbable continuity mixed in with Grimm, Kafka and Calvino. I find it impossible to describe the book further or the events that are chronicled. There is a sense that the story morphs from page to page like fungal growth and develops in the way the pupae of a butterfly that is a recurring theme. The story is liquid and cunning and by the end you are exhausted and exhilarated. — Allan Bealy Cartarescu binds together unrestrained fantasy with a precise, poetic language. Seldom have the crumbling curtains of communism brought out such a marvelous Beauty. — Der Stern With a deft hand Cartarescu crosses every border between organic and inorganic, animal and human, narration and reflection ... and lets loose once again an uncanny plot with immense linguistic power and feverous intensity, which drags the reader along with it like a river bursting its banks. — Frankfurter Rundschau A gigantic literary coup ... Wild and heedless, here is a still unpruned author on a spiritual quest, for which in its anarchistic rampancy there is currently no equivalent in western literature. — Die Zeit The cosmos of the writer Cartarescu is one in which the conventional slides into the fantastic, in which a few pages and eons later a new milky way will emerge from a horn concert in a cream-colored Dacia. — Frankfurter Rundschau With Blinding Cartarescu has erected a monument of world literature for Bucharest. — Der Standard His novel is a cathedral of both imagination and knowledge, a riddle, in which a 40-year-old demonstrates his unique literary potential.... Mircea Cartarescus masterwork catapults him to the peak of European literature. — Neue Zürcher Zeitung The apocalypse of a gloomy, now extinct world is described in an extravagant language, in which the author always hits the right metaphor, and the intertwined, fragmented story, at times made up of a dozen narrations, never becomes exhausting. Literature as it has not appeared for many years. A hymn! — Erich Klein, Falter A writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few. — Andrei Codrescu Cărtărescu’s fluid formalism translates all into some of the most imaginative literature since that of the masters mentioned by name in the text (Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar, among others). — Joshua Cohen, New Haven Review Cartarescus phantasmagorical world is similar to Dalís dreamscapes. — Kirkus Reviews Cartarescus is taking Europe by storm, with nostalgia leading the way and garnering prize after prize in France, Italy, German... — Christian Moraru, American Review Gripping, impassioned, unexpected—the qualities that the best in literature possesses. — Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times Book Review If George Lucas were a poet, this is how he would write. — Benjamin Lytal, New York Sun Cartarescu’s magical mystery tour has begun. Memories warp into fantasies and cityscape melts in and out of dreamscape. Segments of realism (the narrator’s family’s history, his country’s Soviet occupation) serve as springboards to great swaths of surrealism, much of it nightmarish (marauding zombie armies, statues that come to life). We get gypsy folklore, bloody legends, close-up anatomical detail and grotesque erotic reveries. — Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star tribune For English readers, the arrival of Blinding: Volume 1 is a great gift from the gods of altered reality...It is tempting, when encountering a new translation, to compare the foreign author with someone more familiar...to try to make a faithful comparison to an English or American novel...;those who reach into nightmares to capture the monsters in our waking lives. Still, Cărtărescu’s scope and ambition, soaring to metafiction and beyond, surpasses most of these comparisons — KGB Bar Lit Magazine At once philosophical and historical, the novel is full of fresh insights and remarkable turns of phrase. Sean Cotter’s translation only adds to the book’s emotional tenor, since it reads like an English-language original, and it would not be too surprising to see this become an American bestseller as well. — The Coffin Factory ...like the Prague of Michal Ajvaz and the Buenos Aires of Borges, in Cărtărescu’s hand the rooms, gazes, corners, lamps, current events, political officials, ruins, hallways, and basements of Bucharest become portals to hidden, dreamlike, distorted, and yet visceral worlds. Reader, beware: one might veer into them at any second. — Cleaver Magazine ...Cărtărescu’s prose, so magically transformed into English by Cotter, speaks to the reader with a lush and fruitful honesty. Time and again, he produces imagery you, the reader, are sure you’ve held in the quiet of your own subconscious, mirrored in Maria and Mircea’s own search for memories and images of their pasts. — Cleaver Magazine It is tempting, when encountering a new translation, to compare the foreign author with someone more familiar ... those who reach into nightmares to capture the monsters in our waking lives. Still, Cărtărescu’s scope and ambition, soaring to metafiction and beyond, surpasses most of these comparisons. — Asymptote Journal For English readers, the arrival of Blinding: Volume 1 is a great gift from the gods of altered reality. — KGB
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 07:19:45 +0000
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