“From the first lines with which you layer the page, the hand that holds the pen slips into a foreign, mocking hand, as though entering a glove.”
I stopped at this sentence and reread it several times. The idea is unsettling: that the act of writing, which we imagine as a form of disclosure, immediately estranges. Cărtărescu begins not with memory or confession but with a fracture. The voice that sets out to speak is not the voice that arrives on the page. Intention gives way to distortion, even parody.
He doesn’t describe this as failure but as the basic condition of writing. What comes forth isn’t the self but a residue, unstable and strange. The figures (Spider, Degenerate, God) emerge not to clarify but to unsettle. The effort to speak plainly calls up something excessive, something that resists containment. Literature, he writes, is teratology.
This is the opening of Nostalgia, in Julian Semilian’s English translation. Already there is no stable narrator, no firm ground. The book begins in difficulty and stays there. It asks not for belief but for a willingness to remain with the discomfort of its premise: that writing never says what it sets out to, and that this failure is the material it works with.
Look forward to hearing what you think of his work. I’m probably somewhat biased, having known him personally (albeit briefly) in my youth, when he was a professor of literature and also ran a writing group at the university. I really like some of his work and thought some of it was terribly pretentious.
I’m surprised, given his literary “insider” status, of how little of his work is translated in English. I’m pleased that Deep Vellum have plans for Solenoid, but it would be good to see the Blinding trilogy parts II and III, and I hope his journals are also translated one day.
His journals are quite relatable (writer’s block, anxiety about how his work is received etc.) but also quite funny (sulking about not winning the Nobel Prize etc.). Have yet to read Solenoid, but I think that will possibly be my favourite one of his.
Yes, I’m looking forward to a Deep Vellum/Sean Cotter translation in 2021. It appears the Blinding trilogy has stopped; the translator may have got in too deep!
I attended a Center for the Art of Translation video talk by Sean Cotter when his Blinding came out, and I recall a murmur going through the whole room when he said he wasn’t sure he’d translate the other volumes. I gathered that the task had been quite taxing. Good to see that he’s still working, though, as Solenoid is the one I’m most interested in reading.
I think I read an interview or transcript where he implied the same. I’m also looking forward to Solenoid. At the moment though I’m more than a little blown away by Nostalgia.
Beautiful – I hadn’t heard the word or I confess of the writer / thanks