HYPERREALISM

Mircea Cărtărescu: Solenoid (Deep Vellum Press 2024) translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter

Georgi Gospodinov: The Physics of Sorrow (Liveright) translated by from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Aristotle: Poetics a new translation from Greek (somewhat) by Anthony Kenny

These two Eastern Europeans are taking literature back to magic and forward to its highest mission. They are reconnecting the novel to where Borges, Queneau, Eco, Dali, De Andrade and Marquez left it burning. It was an unattended fire almost extinguished by the streams of piss from memoirists. There is no blame here: the victims couldn't hold it any longer, their bladders burst into language. The language of memoirs is the frayed prose of therapy, which can clothe real victims, but also fakes. Every human is a traumatized victim for every reason imaginable, but memoir peddlers victimize readers, and worst of all, they bore children. Unfortunately, trauma-ramas sell and mint new writers who pass on the counterfeit currency of mindless language to the unsuspecting. The therapy memoir is the new pornography posing as the enemy of the old pornography, now online. There will always be consumers. And then there is Cărtărescu and Gospodin, descendants of Sheherezade, Ovid, Dante, the Bhagvad Gita, Cervantes, Rabelais and Lautreamont. They have burst into the crowd of pissing memoirists with the sturm und drang of their imaginations. These writers are holding on to the raft of poetry, they are the survivors of a cataclysm, and because they are survivors they are also memoirists. In other words, they activate  the awareness of trauma in the language of hyper attention, a language protected from harm by imagination. They rarely piss on themselves, but when they do they are sure to break your heart. There is no cure, there is no cure for love... So listen, readers: the new magic hyper-realists are taking back the light. The inclusion of Aristotle's Poetics in this company is to remind alert readers that poetry is the high art that knows how to talk about the new-old art of these magic hyper-realists.