Los Conocedores

A door to the beating heart of Blinding. Three stories that condense the visionary genius of Mircea Cărtărescu, his overflowing poetry, his hallucinatory imagery, and his astonishing ability to transform the autobiographical into a dazzling, mythical universe. A book that is both map and treasure. The Connoisseurs brings together three extraordinary stories--one from each volume of the Blinding trilogy--that function as privileged windows into Mircea Cărtărescu's most intimate, dreamlike, and overflowing universe. A work capable of containing--like a baroque miniature--the vertigo and boundless beauty of the trilogy that changed contemporary European literature. In "The Badislavs," we witness the escape of an archaic clan through a landscape that seems to have emerged from the Apocalypse, inhabited by angels, demons, and creatures whose existence transcends all logic. "The Circus" returns us to 1960s Bucharest, transformed here into a living organism. A child--Mircea himself--attends a show where giant beetles, carpets hiding state secrets, and girls with butterfly wings merge into a tale of memory and revelation. Finally, "The Wedding" drags the reader to Lake Como, during the wedding of Count Witold Csartarowsky: a coven of mythological figures, delusions, and memories where the boundaries between time, dream, and matter dissolve forever.