Search results for ""Author Mircea Cartarescu""

Based on Cartarescu's own experience as a teacher, Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life and spirals into an existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics. Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, it grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths. In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.

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Superada la barrera psicológica de los cincuenta años y con plena conciencia de que lo mejor ha pasado, Cartarescu nos invita a adentrarnos en su paisaje biográfico, geográfico y literario personal, en un tono que mezcla la comedia con una acentuada amargura existencial.Aquí encontraremos remembranzas sobre paradisíacas islas en medio del Danubio, reflexiones acerca de los peligros de la adicción al café soluble y confesiones íntimas sobre el amor, la muerte y la nostalgia que culminan con la estremecedora El ojo castaño de nuestro amor, dedicada al hermano gemelo perdido en trágicas circunstancias. Delicados artefactos narrativos absolutamente inseparables del animal literario que es su autor, como nos demuestra el extraño descubrimiento que hace en la Lolita, de Nabokov, o la descripción de los días previos a la muerte de Ovidio en el exilio. Todo ello se une, como las cucarachas que según él Darwin se entretenía en ensartar en un palo, para configurar una suerte de arqueología e

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L?ala esquerra és la primera part d?Encegador, un monument literari concebut en forma de papallona que narra un viatge vital a través d?un Bucarest on es fonen l?experiència personal i el temps històric. Aquest volum se centra en la infantesa i la joventut del protagonista, un trajecte mitològic i fantasmal on les estàtues cobren vida i els records familiars esdevenen llegendes fosques. C?rt?rescu es mostra en aquest llibre en tota la seva esplendor.

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'Cartarescu is one of the great literary voices of Central Europe' Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize winner and author of Flights'A Danubian Narnia. . . his writing delivers a rainbow-hued riot of fantasy, imagination and invention' Boyd Tonkin, SpectatorA dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the dark world of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child messiah works his magic in the tenements, a young man explores gender boundaries, a woman relives her youth and an architect becomes obsessed with the sound of his new car horn - with unexpected consequences. Blending reality and symbolism, time and myth, this is a cult masterwork from Romania's most celebrated writer.

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, Words Without BordersA highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding, Solenoid is an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life, while on a broad scale Solenoid's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines attempt to reconcile the realms of life and art. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis preventorium, encounters with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. One character asks another: When you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? Combining fiction with autobiography and history—Nikola Tesla and Charles Hinton, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.

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Mircea Cartarescu, born in 1956, is one of Romania's leading novelists and poets. This translation of his 1989 novel Nostalgia, writes Andrei Codrescu, "introduces to English 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." Like most of his literary contemporaries of the avant-garde Eighties Generation, his major work has been translated into several European languages, with the notable exception, until now, of English. Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. 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, humankind's primordial myth-making, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship.

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