A Spider's History of Love

By Mircea Cartarescu

2020

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

136

Number of Pages

4H07M

Audio Length

Before becoming the most important Romanian novelist of his generation, Mircea Cărtărescu wrote poetry influenced by the “hallucinatory imagery” of Allen Ginsberg and distinguished by its Beat sensibility and humor. Cărtărescu was in his twenties in the ’80s, and his word-slinging poems, with references to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, remain subversive gestures under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauș “The West opened my eyes.” A young man “overwhelmed by loneliness,” charged with erotic, urban energy, and besotted with Natalie Wood, he observed the anonymous women on bicycles and at tram stops with “my hundred thousand eyes, crematoria windows of sparks, [which] set the fir trees ablaze and leave the mountainbald.” Brimming with adolescent yearning, self-consciously “complicated,” and unwilling to silence themselves, Cărtărescu’s poems convey the nervous vibrancy of the younger generation living immediately before and after the fall of communism.

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Author

Mircea Cartarescu

Author · 40 books

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.