The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei Călinescu
An NYRB Classics Original
Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist.
This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zacharias Lichter is a vagrant and philosopher with "the fiery personality of one of the last descendants of the ancient race of great prophets" whose tirades and mad beliefs are recorded in Clinescu's Romanian classic, which he began writing in the late 1950s and published in 1969. An iconoclastic treatment of man's capacity for love and existence itself, Clinescu's book narrowly escaped the Communist censors when first published . Now in English for the first time, it's stunning that Lichter's freewheeling discourse on the necessity of revolution, the transience of mortal law, and the importance of sympathy for the worker who constantly sells his powers "at a loss" was allowed to see print in the restrictive climes of midcentury Romania. In a kind of rejoinder to Nietzsche and Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Lichter, the self-described "prophet-clown," wanders the streets with his only friend, the alcoholic Leopold Nacht. He composes poems, begs for alms, and challenges the prejudices of so-called learned men, whether they be doctors or mathematicians. He defends the lot of thieves and wanderers with madcap takes on Dante, the Greeks, and even God himself. This book-length panegyric from a raving genius is a strange and uncompromised response to modernity run amok.
