The third and final part of Orbitor, the most ambitious project of Mircea Cartarescu, considered the best Romanian writer after 1989, has been chosen recently as the Book of the Year. Orbitor (Blinding) would certainly have been an impossible undertaking for most writers, even for it's sheer size, as the three volumes count over 1500 pages. Orbitor is hard to narate and even harder to read, at least at first, before the strange magic of the writer's style overwelms you. The most important in postwar Romanian literature was written and published over a period of ten years, which kept the many readers of Mircea Cartarescu in a state which combined impatience and despair.
The final volume, "Orbitor.Aripa dreapta" (Blinding. The Right Wing) finally closes all the narative threads, explaining the mysteries from the previous volumes and finishing what at one point seemed to be a phantastical history of the Universe. Recently, Humanitas Publishing House launched the final edition of Orbitor, a huge volume in the best graphical quality possible, at a reasonable price, and it seems that this final and complete edition has already found it's supporters. And buyers.
2007-12-20
