Yes I’m leaning towards the “language as an art form” for my
top reads of 2014. I could have done a listing of the “most readable books” or
even the ones I didn’t like (I may still do that before the year is out), but I’ve
gone with the books that were the most memorable for me, the ones which
challenged my thinking, the ones that still haunt me, the ones where I occasionally
bring them up in random conversations, the ones that touched me.
Cartarescu’s “Blinding” did most of those things, but I can
tell you one striking thing it did, it gave me a serious appreciation for
butterflies.
“Blinding (The Left Wing)” is the first part of a Cartarescu
triptych (let’s call it that and not a trilogy as it forms part of a greater
picture, the left wing being his mother, the body himself and the right wing
his father from what I understand) and this triptych is a massive, intricate
butterfly. The references to butterflies are too frequent to mention them all,
from the birthmark on Maria’s (his mother’s) hip, an ivory engraved ring made
from a mammoth’s tusk, a monstrous frozen butterfly under the surface of the
Danube (which is consumed and the wings used for clothing), butterflies that
attach themselves to Russian soldiers in a mausoleum and then lay an egg in his
brain or even one that mates with a stranded elevator operator after the
building is bombed. The metamorphosis is a constant thread along with triangles
(structurally, physically, spiritually) and the colour yellow.
To say this is a complex work is an understatement, delving
into a tortured mind would always be so, are we talking dreams here, or the
everyday machinations of our narrator’s mind?
I felt in my sleep how, in this
geyser of light, my own cranium became transparent, how the wrinkled
hemispheres of my brain, wrapped in their skin, looked like the meat of walnuts
yet unformed. The neurons under the pia mater, like spores bedded under
asphalt, swelled here and there, growing hundreds of church spires under the
sky of my skull, each one with a bell tolling for a funeral, until the pearly
skin broke in hundreds of places and the neuron bells opened like wonders, like
sea urchins on the peduncles, rocking and undulating in the solar wind of my
Tataie’s halo. I then descended into a delirious Scythia.
How to describe this work? There are chilling stories of
people who lose thier shadows, eight pages of the divine simply exploring
the magic of how we can move a single finger and heavy rhetoric:
Maybe, in the heart of this book,
there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling...
Underneath all of this madness in Cartaresu’s hemispheres is
the city of Bucharest meticulously recreated, familiar statues explored in
detail and their meanings, allegories for Science, Art, Agriculture and Trade
simply part of the narrative. As you wallow inside Cartarescu’s brain you
uncover a city, a country, that is part of, is actually passed, a great war.
Our writer imagines he can control the city, just like the control he uses to
move his finger.
When you are living inside the narrator’s “pia mater” you
come across some seriously surreal stuff:
Cripples, dwarfs, cachexics,
coxalgics, myelomeningoceliacs, the monstrously obese, cyclopedes, those with
cleft lips, eleven fingers and eleven toes, bruised skin from a cardiac
deformity, lepers, those scarred by anthrax, by scrofula, by vitiligo...the
curved line of giant statues embraced the room with a ring of mutilations, and
the funeral train advanced across its endless surface, like a parade of mites.
Special mention here has to go to translator Sean Cotter,
who is either a genius by bringing to the English language such deeply obscure
words, or he’s just as offbeat as Cartarescu in his thinking. This would not
have been an easy work to translate, as you can probably gather by the few
simple quotes I have included here, the novel runs to 464 pages!!!
I’m yet to touch on the broader subject of this amazing
work, Cartarescu’s mother, because even though we are passengers hitching a
ride through our writer’s dark mental caverns this is actually the story of his
mother, how she moved to Bucharest, how she met his father, her experiences of
war, of meeting a jazz drummer from New Orleans who has a penchant for
masochism, her sexual awakening and her darkest dreams. A twisted homage
to a parent?
I sat on the balcony in my pajamas
for half an hour, watching the clouds, whiter than the very white sky, outlined
in light, and when I went back into the kitchen, I felt I was entering a
sinister cave. In the deep shadow, Mamma seemed like a gypsy woman forgotten on
a chair beside the stove, all dark and sweaty, except for the globes of her
eyes, which caught the blinding folds of the summer sky. Wasps in yellow
plating crawled everywhere. They’d made a nest in the vent and had come through
its metal grill. There were wasps as big as my fingers on my mother’s body, as
though she were some kind of odd animal trainer. They pulled themselves along
with their powerful buccal mechanisms, through her fine, thin, chestnut hair
that was untouched by gray, spinning their wings like fans. I told her I was
going for a walk. I got dressed and went into the blinding heat outside.
This is not a novel for those who would like to lay poolside
and discover whodunit, it is a slow contemplative piece, an amazingly complex
construction and a true example of how language can be art. Another classic
example of how writers in translation are pushing the boundaries of the written
word, pushing their reader’s boundaries to a higher plane:
It was a place to attempt (as
I’ve done continuously for the last three months) to go back to where no
one has, to remember what no one remembers, to understand what no
person can understand: who I am, what I am.
Just as I’m looking forward to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle
Part Four, Jon Kalman Stefansson ‘s final part of his trilogy and Elena
Ferrante’s final instalment of the Neapolitan Series, I can’t wait for the
second part of Cartarescu’s triptych (the body). Busy 2015???
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