beer good
Well-Known Member
What Orbitor (having read 2 out of 3 volumes) is:
* It's the autobiography of Mircea Cărtărescu, born in 1956, growing up in Ceaușescu's Romania with everything that that entails, and eventually deciding to write his autobiography of Mircea Cărtărescu, born in 1956, growing up in...
* It's three volumes, roughly 500 pages each, subtitled Left Wing, Body, Right Wing. The central metaphor is a giant butterfly that can only move by flapping its wings: one in the past that cannot be changed or controlled, one in the future that cannot be known, and in the middle a thin, prosaic body of Now that nobody sees, being too busy looking at the colourful wings. Larva, pupa, flight. Feed, digest, write.
* It's often quite straight-forward and realistic. It's often anything but. The line between the two gets... blurry.
* It's chaos theory; like a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, every tiny detail of life is part of what makes everyone end up where they are.
* It's a paradox, much like life in a dictatorship where anyone might be an informant must be: everything is a secret, everything is transparent. Whenever the narrator sees anything, he sees everything; their past and that of their ancestors, every step along the way that brought them here, the endlessly complex wings of Past and Future flapping alongside their everyday bodies. The narrator has compound eyes. Any person, any object down to the simplest fixtures (elevator buttons!), can be used as a starting point to explore the world. He can zoom in endlessly, but like a Mandelbrot set, each story contains itself within itself. Or maybe he's just projecting. It's four-dimensional storytelling to give Pynchon vertigo.
* It's unstuck in time.
* It's a world where magical thinking works - or at least exists. The first volume is partly set in the once-upon-a-time past, it's all fairy tale and myth, as any history set in central Europe tends to be; the second volume in Mircea's youth, and like all children, his life is so full of both terrors and wonders that it gets both difficult and irrelevant to draw a strict line between reality and imagination (no talking tigers named after philosophers as of yet, though). The third volume...?
* It is, you might argue if you're not sick of namedropping, a post-Iron curtain post-Marquez Tristram Shandy done really well.
* It's occasionally full-on psychedelic body horror that would make David Cronenberg literally weep blood. (OK, he's David Cronenberg, that's what he always weeps.) At other points, it crosses over into science fiction. There's an entire subplot set in early 20th century New Orleans - you need jazz in a story like this. Anyone arguing that there's something cyberpunkish about the whole setup, dissolving the very idea of a clearly defined human body and a clearly defined human mind as the subject, would get no disagreement from me.
* It's both similar and completely different to another huge autobiographical novel, Knausgård's My Struggle; both are the stories of their own creation, autobiography as a way of understanding the world; but where Knausgård starts out with Descartes and draws his solipsist ergos one by one, Cartarescu starts in the other end, submerging himself in everything around him in order to create himself.
* It's "an impossible book, an unreadable book" that I can't help but keep reading.
* It's about a young man gazing out from a window in a concrete house in Bucharest.
* It's FUN. Hard work. But fun.
* It's the autobiography of Mircea Cărtărescu, born in 1956, growing up in Ceaușescu's Romania with everything that that entails, and eventually deciding to write his autobiography of Mircea Cărtărescu, born in 1956, growing up in...
* It's three volumes, roughly 500 pages each, subtitled Left Wing, Body, Right Wing. The central metaphor is a giant butterfly that can only move by flapping its wings: one in the past that cannot be changed or controlled, one in the future that cannot be known, and in the middle a thin, prosaic body of Now that nobody sees, being too busy looking at the colourful wings. Larva, pupa, flight. Feed, digest, write.
* It's often quite straight-forward and realistic. It's often anything but. The line between the two gets... blurry.
* It's chaos theory; like a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, every tiny detail of life is part of what makes everyone end up where they are.
* It's a paradox, much like life in a dictatorship where anyone might be an informant must be: everything is a secret, everything is transparent. Whenever the narrator sees anything, he sees everything; their past and that of their ancestors, every step along the way that brought them here, the endlessly complex wings of Past and Future flapping alongside their everyday bodies. The narrator has compound eyes. Any person, any object down to the simplest fixtures (elevator buttons!), can be used as a starting point to explore the world. He can zoom in endlessly, but like a Mandelbrot set, each story contains itself within itself. Or maybe he's just projecting. It's four-dimensional storytelling to give Pynchon vertigo.
* It's unstuck in time.
* It's a world where magical thinking works - or at least exists. The first volume is partly set in the once-upon-a-time past, it's all fairy tale and myth, as any history set in central Europe tends to be; the second volume in Mircea's youth, and like all children, his life is so full of both terrors and wonders that it gets both difficult and irrelevant to draw a strict line between reality and imagination (no talking tigers named after philosophers as of yet, though). The third volume...?
* It is, you might argue if you're not sick of namedropping, a post-Iron curtain post-Marquez Tristram Shandy done really well.
* It's occasionally full-on psychedelic body horror that would make David Cronenberg literally weep blood. (OK, he's David Cronenberg, that's what he always weeps.) At other points, it crosses over into science fiction. There's an entire subplot set in early 20th century New Orleans - you need jazz in a story like this. Anyone arguing that there's something cyberpunkish about the whole setup, dissolving the very idea of a clearly defined human body and a clearly defined human mind as the subject, would get no disagreement from me.
* It's both similar and completely different to another huge autobiographical novel, Knausgård's My Struggle; both are the stories of their own creation, autobiography as a way of understanding the world; but where Knausgård starts out with Descartes and draws his solipsist ergos one by one, Cartarescu starts in the other end, submerging himself in everything around him in order to create himself.
* It's "an impossible book, an unreadable book" that I can't help but keep reading.
* It's about a young man gazing out from a window in a concrete house in Bucharest.
* It's FUN. Hard work. But fun.
