Mircea Cărtărescu began writing The Levant in 1987, when he was a bitter teacher at a neighborhood school in Bucharest. Freshly married and with a young daughter, he wrote in the kitchen, on his typewriter Erika, on a rubber tablecloth; With one hand he typed and the other rocked the little girl's pram.
It concluded the work a few months before the fall of the communism, without even dreaming with the possibility of publishing it. The result was one of the most fascinating poetic experiments ever written: a heroic-comic epic, which is also an adventure through the history of Romanian literature, which follows the technique used by James Joyce in the chapter of Ulysses "The oxen of the sun". But it is not necessary to know Romanian literature to enjoy as a child the adventures of the poet Manoil, Zotalis, the beautiful Zenaida, the fearsome Yogurt, the pirates and thieves that sw...read more
