Cuerpo, El

The body is the central building of the dazzling Blinder trilogy. An overwhelming, hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic and intellectually subversive book that marks a before and after in the history of European literature... Bucharest in the mid-sixties. Romania is a gray country dominated by the Party. But for the young Mircea, who is eight years old, reality is prodigious and takes the form of an involuntary comedy. Present and past merge: the lubricious Vasile, a boy who grew up without a shadow in the picturesque Bucharest of the 19th century; Maria, a girl with butterfly wings growing from her back; the erratic Herman, a night watchman on whose floor hangs a painting containing the entire universe; the Borgesian cubic rugs woven by Mircea's mother, concealing state secrets; the mystical appearance of the amazing Serpent Man, an embodiment of the wondrous soul of ancient India; Mircea and his missing brother Victor, huddled together with their heads at each other's feet, like the zodiacal sign of Pisces; the grotesque Amsterdam's statuesque men and ruby-colored skies. Although what stands out above it all is Bucharest, a place that seems a living being in which all cities can fit...