I found your blog by googling around for responses to Blinding, which blew my mind permanently when I read it seven years ago. Overall I appreciate the review, the depth you went into, how you sort of circled around its creation and context before delving into the nitty-gritty. In passing I'd like to register my disagreement about Wallace and his Sierpinski gasket; although you made a clever and apt comparison in extending it to Blinding, Infinite Jest just fulfills that same structure in a different way, one that relates to theme rather than plot. The outer triangle is something like America, the lesser triangles the halfway house and the tennis academy, and every exfoliation of the themes unfolds within those structures, from country, to institution, to person. The three brothers, modeled the Brothers Karamazov, represent another triangle... and so on. Infinite Jest seems confusing, but treat it as a primarily conceptual work and it becomes instantly clear, with a thematic thoroughline that develops without break until the last fifty pages or so.
If Blinding has a meaning overarching its parts, then I'd say you've made a good stab at summarizing it. But I am not sure whether such a meaning predominates. It's almost too much to ask what it is all about, because every page is directly about its themes. You can point to anything and say, 'This is what it is about.' We know Cartarescu was improvising, therefore he was sort of writing in the moment, existing within the space of the sentence, the paragraph. That's why he can contradict himself, or argue opposite viewpoints as in the Big Bang chapter - he's just right there saying whatever he feels, following the thoughts wherever they take him. Whatever binding themes arise are simply the ones moving through his subconscious, as you can see by the repetition of nearly all these ideas in Solenoid (your review of which I will read soon!).
I wish Cartarescu would gain more recognition. In my opinion he's just as exciting an author as Pynchon, and he has broken new ground in how to write novels. Pynchon is amazing, but he casts the reader out; his stream-of-consciousness often doesn't include any handholds for the struggling reader. But Cartarescu works at the level of images and rhetoric, rather than deconstructing the structure of sentences, so his work remains brilliantly clear, building upon itself into images of almost unbearable intensity.
This last quote about how we communicate through empathy is explicit and fascinating. When u add that to the points about atmosphere over plot, these 2 perspectives together are to me at the level of fundamental truth, and very apparent to an active visual artist and psychotherapist . These things are true. That’s what spending time with clients reveals , and that’s what painting reveals , as people look for the one that speaks to them.
I found your blog by googling around for responses to Blinding, which blew my mind permanently when I read it seven years ago. Overall I appreciate the review, the depth you went into, how you sort of circled around its creation and context before delving into the nitty-gritty. In passing I'd like to register my disagreement about Wallace and his Sierpinski gasket; although you made a clever and apt comparison in extending it to Blinding, Infinite Jest just fulfills that same structure in a different way, one that relates to theme rather than plot. The outer triangle is something like America, the lesser triangles the halfway house and the tennis academy, and every exfoliation of the themes unfolds within those structures, from country, to institution, to person. The three brothers, modeled the Brothers Karamazov, represent another triangle... and so on. Infinite Jest seems confusing, but treat it as a primarily conceptual work and it becomes instantly clear, with a thematic thoroughline that develops without break until the last fifty pages or so.
If Blinding has a meaning overarching its parts, then I'd say you've made a good stab at summarizing it. But I am not sure whether such a meaning predominates. It's almost too much to ask what it is all about, because every page is directly about its themes. You can point to anything and say, 'This is what it is about.' We know Cartarescu was improvising, therefore he was sort of writing in the moment, existing within the space of the sentence, the paragraph. That's why he can contradict himself, or argue opposite viewpoints as in the Big Bang chapter - he's just right there saying whatever he feels, following the thoughts wherever they take him. Whatever binding themes arise are simply the ones moving through his subconscious, as you can see by the repetition of nearly all these ideas in Solenoid (your review of which I will read soon!).
I wish Cartarescu would gain more recognition. In my opinion he's just as exciting an author as Pynchon, and he has broken new ground in how to write novels. Pynchon is amazing, but he casts the reader out; his stream-of-consciousness often doesn't include any handholds for the struggling reader. But Cartarescu works at the level of images and rhetoric, rather than deconstructing the structure of sentences, so his work remains brilliantly clear, building upon itself into images of almost unbearable intensity.
This last quote about how we communicate through empathy is explicit and fascinating. When u add that to the points about atmosphere over plot, these 2 perspectives together are to me at the level of fundamental truth, and very apparent to an active visual artist and psychotherapist . These things are true. That’s what spending time with clients reveals , and that’s what painting reveals , as people look for the one that speaks to them.