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Romanian literature
As indicated through my forthcoming book by Ex Occidente, Romanian literature is an area of intense interest for me and I wish to recommend a recently released translation called Blinding by Mircea Cartarescu (Volume 1, Left Wing of 3 volumes). Cartarescu was heavily influenced by the Romanian surrealism and onirism movements and most would be already aware of his book Nostalgia. Here is a random extract (truly random as it is impossible to be selective with this book):
"Below ground, in narrow pine houses, the dead were starving. For the past forty days no kolaches or coliva or rice with milk had come down from the living. Fearful they would die a second time, from hunger and oblivion, the dead began to stir, like a dangerous underground river. Chattering their powerful teeth, they began to break the shards of wood, spongy and full of cockchafer larvae, and they dug tunnels to each other like moles, to consult in twos and threes or, finally, all of them together, in their underground village, packed into an alcove whose walls ran with roots, where the urns above their souls glowed like crystals. Three hundred dead, weak from the long fast, but animated with a fury only the departed can know, knocked their livid, mouldy skulls and chafed their blackened clothes against each other. They held long, frenzied meetings, and stared at each other with gaping eye sockets full of worms. At the start of winter, at nightfall on the feast day of Saint Mina, Ermoghen, and Eugraf, a putrid, dry and bare-toothed host broke a path toward the white world. There were old dead with shanks as yellow as cow's, so addled they couldn't keep track of their bones, who left knuckles and jaws behind in their ancient caskets. There were young dead, still wrapped in long shifts, with vines of flesh as dry as pastrami on their faces and torso, and dead women with the butterflies of their hips widened by births, and their ribcages wrapped in flesh like unbeaten hemp. There were dead children a few years old, overcome by skulls too heavy for their delicate cadavers. There were rotting dogs and cats raised up by the mania of the host they followed alongside. The poisoned air swirled overhead like green smoke, blowing toward the night's first stars………."
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10-30-2013
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