During their adventures, a young boy sacrifices his shadow to save his family. The protagonist's ancestors have to flee their village south of the Danube River because of the dead who return from their graves.

The trilogy transcends reality and ventures into the world of dreams, nightmares, hallucinations and the surreal. He does not regard himself as a novelist and storyteller, but as a poet. However, Mircea Cartarescu explained that he never intended to write a realist novel on this dark chapter of Romanian and Eastern European history. Members of the secret service philosophize on the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of torture. 'Ash-colored' people are waiting like 'rodents' in long lines, desperately hoping to be able to buy some bread. The German translation of the trilogy's second volume Image: Zsolnay The protagonist's mother weaves a carpet with an intricate pattern and is subsequently accused of hiding secret messages by the dictator's much-feared intelligence service, Securitate. The trilogy reflects the grievances and absurdities of life under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania, which ended in December 1989. In an interview during his US tour in 2013, he described the book as an 'autobiography, albeit a very unreliable one.'

The three volumes of 'Orbitor' have been translated into German and published by Zsolnay in Vienna and the first volume, 'Blinding: The Left Wing,' was also translated into English in 2013 and published by Archipelago Books in New York.Ĭartarescu's masterpiece, 'Orbitor,' blends memories from the author's childhood and youth in Bucharest, stories about his parents and ancestors, reflections on writing and consciousness itself, satire, science, and the surreal. The Leipzig Book Award, presented on Wednesday, March 11, pays tribute to personalities who have built cultural bridges between Western, Central and Eastern Europe. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The 58-year-old writer and university professor of literature from Bucharest has been called a 'hot tip for the Nobel Prize' by the newspaper 'The Independent' and many other publications. A particularly impressive expression of this inner freedom and creativity can be found in his trilogy, 'Blinding' ('Orbitor' in Romanian), which has won him this year's Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Writing is a way of 'preserving your inner freedom in a totalitarian regime,' Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu said in a television interview with DW.

Blinding mircea cartarescu