I liked the smell of the wood bed, the pine that still smelled of sap, I even liked the smell of lindane. Dad would get out the pump and give them a foul-smelling lindane bath, slaughtering them where they hid in the wooden joints. I would laugh with such delight that my mother, who kept my curly hair long, would scoop me up and spit on me, so I wouldn’t catch the evil eye. I could hardly wait for my dad to lift the heavy mattress up (when he changed the sheets), so I could see the chubby little bugs. But the tiny berries between the mattress and the bedframe scattered into the dark corners, they looked so panicked that it made me laugh. They were little black seeds, hard and shiny like blackberries, or those beads on ivy that I knew I shouldn’t put in my mouth. My father would hoist up the mattress to show them to me. I remember them, I saw them with my own eyes when I was about three, in the little house on Floreasca where we lived in ’59–60. It’s not that bad, at least we don’t have bedbugs, we haven’t had those in a while.

Within a few days, the entire school reeks of the anti-lice solution. Instead, she recommends the parents apply a cloudy liquid that smells like lye, the same one the teachers use. Half the kids there have lice, the nurse finds them at the start of the year, during her check-up, when she goes through the kids’ hair with the expert motions of a chimpanzee-except she doesn’t crush the lice between her teeth, stained with the chitin of previously captured insects. I can’t avoid lice-I teach at a school on the edge of town. The comb collects bunches of them, I scrub it with the worn-out bristles of an old toothbrush. I find nits constantly, I pull them off in the bathroom when I comb my hair: little, ivory eggs, glistening darkly against the porcelain around the faucet. It doesn’t surprise me anymore, doesn’t disgust me. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter's English translation. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. Cărtărescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. The following is from Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid.

Solenoid roman mircea cărtărescu