Mircea Cartarescu was born in 1956, is one of Romania’s leading novelists and poets. Like most of his literary contemporaries of the avant-garde Eighties Generation, his major work has been translated into several European languages. Graduated from the University of Bucharest’s Faculty of Letters, between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher (and then at the Writers Union). In 1991 he became a lecturer at the Chair of Romanian Literary History, (University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters).
Although each of its five chapters is separate and stands alone, a thematic, even mesmeric harmony finds itself in children’s games, the music of the spheres, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship. Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia, by Mircea Cărtărescu https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-Directions-Paperbook-Mircea-Cartarescu/dp/0811215881 should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination: will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be.
Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding https://www.amazon.com/Blinding-Mircea-Cartarescu/dp/1935744844 was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist’s childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, Secret police, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, and the installation of the communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from this strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed.
