plurivers

by Mircea Cărtărescu, Razvan Luscov (Illustrator)

Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Romanian poet, novelist, essayist and a professor at the University of Bucharest.

Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language And Literature, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher, and then he worked at the Writers Union and as an editor at the Caiete Critice magazine. In 1991 he became a lecturer at the Chair of Romanian Literary History, part of the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters. As of 2010, he is an associate professor. Between 1994-1995 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

Among his writings: "Nostalgia" (a full edition of the earlier published "Visul"), 1993, "Travesti" 1994, "Orbitor" 2001, "Enciclopedia zmeilor" ("The Encyclopedia of Dragons") 2002, "Pururi tânãr, înfãsurat în pixeli" ("Forever young, convolved in pixels") 2002, "De ce iubim femeile" bestseller ("Why do we love women") 2004.

Reviews

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, nobody's going to call plurivers subtle, and that's fine. Mircea Cărtărescu paints in big, loud colors and trusts you to keep up. It works because the energy never drops. Great for readers who like a book that grabs them by the collar, skip if you prefer a whisper.

[Yigru Zeltil · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars mostly because this is the first book of poetry which I genuinely loved and which convinced me to write poetry myself. Only after I read this I took on the pursuit of tracking down all the influences that Cărtărescu names himself in his poems: from modernism and avant-garde (Ilarie Voronca, Gellu Naum, but also Eluard, Pound, Eliot, Ginsberg etc.) to the big classics (such as Shakespeare and - a big influence in spite of what some think looking only at the surface of the poems - Eminescu). My long-length poetic adventure has not finished (and probably won't any soon), but I am already less convinced by these poems. Too much fireworks and not enough substance... which is kinda ironic for me to say, as I must admit that a lot of Cărtărescu's influence has went down in my writing and will probably remain so for a long while - for the very good reason that quite many of these poems still go up my alley, in spite of or even because of all the flaws. Not enough for a 5 stars rating, but the sentimental value makes up for it.