Sign and Sight's Books this Season

This is one of my favorite things on the internet (seriously). Every season, signandsight.com puts out a list of the ‘best books’ that have come out in Germany recently. It’s a great resource for us. Even though the list is usually pretty small, there’s always one book that gets me excited. This season, it’s Mircea Cartarescu’s The Knowing:

Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu has “catapulted himself to the summit of European literature” with his novel “Die Wissenden” (the knowing), proclaims the NZZ. High time, then, that he was discovered in Germay, althought it’s not all so easy to say exactly what this book – which takes palce in Bucharest during the socialist era – is about. “Sometimes I explain my book as a mystical butterfly or a flying cathedral,” says the author. Critics are overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of content, as well as the variety of genres Cartarescu masters, yet they still can’t agree on how to classify the book. The NZZ calls it a “masterpiece of literary mannerism” – “as if de Chirico and Kafka, H. R. Giger and Bruno Schulz had got together and written a novel.” The FR, by contrast, is reminded more of Proust, Rilke and Swift. (Read our review feature “Bucharest in a trance.”)

Based on that blurb, it sounds like Yuri Andrukhovych’s Perverzion, which is one of the most incredibly imaginative books I’ve ever read. You can get Cartarescu’s Nostalgia in English, from New Directions, of course.