Orbitor, by Mircea
Cartarescu, has been asleep on my shelf for almost five years. [1]
On the third page of the books I bought I used to
write the purchase date. I wish I had kept this habit. I, as I said in a
previous post, am a slow man. I learn slowly, I read slowly. Decisions take
either seconds or years. I never read books just after buying them: I look at
them, read a few random lines, smell the ink and the glue, stroke the cover -is
it dull and smooth or shiny and sticky?-, rub the pages between my fingers.
Then I drop them wherever I am and go on with life. After a few days I pick
them up again and put them on a shelf, any shelf. By then my home is their home
and they can come and go as they wish. I do not keep them in any specific
order.
Years later, I pick them again. Very, very rarely do I
find them at the place where I had left them. Some of my friends object that
this is mainly due to my habit of moving house every year. I prefer to think
that the books travel at will. They visit each other, talk about themselves,
engage in frantic page-flipping orgies. A very high number of them end up on
the window sills - and wouldn't you pick that precise spot too if you were
confined to the same room day and night?
Some of them run away. I recently found Dhalgren on a shelf at a friend's who
swore he didn't know he had it -"I didn't even read it, for fuck's sake
!"-. Like Orbitor, Dhalgren is a strange one, written in
high style by a mind subject to hallucinations, and a pet book of mine.
I first thought that Orbitor would be another dystopian universe. The opening chapters
show Bucarest in its misery: neon lights flashing restlessly, concrete walls,
small rooms, reclusion. But as I progressed into the book, this initial set-up proves
to work only as the most striking contrast for what comes next: dreams, day or
night dreams of the weirdest kind. The narrator's imagination paints the grim
environment with unnatural colours, populates well-known streets with
unexplainable creatures, carries the body it inhabits through ghostly errands.
After a few chapters, just as I was starting to make
sense of the story's background, Cartarescu sends us somewhere completely
different. Without any warning, from one page to another, it is another space
and time. Is this second universe related to the first one? Are we still in the
same story? In the same novel? For a long time I had no idea. And just as I
reached another turn, where this new story gets a chance to settle down,
Cartarescu shuffles the cards again. The story is sent to yet a different level,
where it finds common ground with the first one.
All this sounds confusing? As I am going through the
final pages of the book, confusion still dominates. The writing is of a master,
even in its French translation. Written in the nineties, it is reminiscent of
Proust ("Past is everything, future is nothing, time has no other
sense"); it carries visions from the Transcendental movement; it has
the strength, the extraordinary energy, of Henry Miller; at times it
makes as much sense as William Burroughs.
Cartarescu confesses a lot of influences. Among the
recent writers, he declares his debt to the South American novel and its magic
realism: Garcia Marques, surely, but mostly
Sabato. “We Romanians” he says in a recent interview to the French radio France
Culture “we see ourselves as a South American country that would have drifted
and beached somewhere in Europe”. He also declares his debt to Bruno Schultz.
Funnily enough, the next book on my reading list is Miéville’s The City and the City, in which opening
credit I found the name of Bruno Schultz!
Schultz’s Street
of Crocodiles will soon join the merry-go-round in my book room. Orbitor’s sequels too, for this is a
book of one kind and a true masterpiece unknown outside Romania.
