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Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius
1975 first printing, hardcover. Tight straight spine. Pages, boards and dustjacket are in overall near mint condition with only a few spots of light shelf rubbing to outer board edges in spots and some dust spots to top outer page edges from storage. Jacket protected in brand new clear plastic protective cover!
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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May 31, 2025
Andrei Codrescu's Involuntary Genius is what happens when Eastern European absurdism, displaced motherhood, and the dark slapstick of authoritarian exile all pile into a car headed west—crashing magnificently through the window of a hat shop in Sibiu.
The book is a memoir only in the loosest sense: Borges meets Bukowski in Bucharest. The "genius" is born mid-brawl at a table strewn with matzoh soup and diamond bribes, enters the world howling in German, Hungarian, Chickenese, and Freud, and spends the next decades trying to unlearn language’s betrayal and relearn the ancient dialect of mother-love.
“She had what she called ‘palpitations,’ a series of flutters which she described with movements of her fingertips like wings,” he writes, and these spectral flutters haunt every scene, whether it’s the grandmother in a haunted Transylvanian castle tracing lumps across her body, or Use the monstrous nanny, steaming with repressed vengeance and onion soup.
The scenes blur gloriously: a boy conjuring armies of ghosts with a three-word spell; a gendarme who venerates the sun like it’s a delinquent god; a castle rotting under the weight of a thousand years of chicken shit, Baronial regret, and feudal gaslighting; a poetry teacher explaining to his mother, over TV dinners and reproachful silences, why he cannot stop writing books that make no money. “Excuse me, sun! I didn’t mean it!” he pleads after blaspheming the sky, and the sun, it seems, does not forgive lightly.
Codrescu, a Romanian-born poet, journalist, and exile-satirist, carries his exile like a drunken limb: inconvenient, hilarious, grotesquely articulate.
The “involuntary genius” is not a genius in the intellectual sense (though he’s infuriatingly clever), but a mutant composite of century, family, ideology, and language.
“There was another kind of me inside,” he confesses, “it writes poetry. It walks on strange streets. It’s half-drunk, half-sober. It loves what it sees.” That’s the book in a sentence: feral, half-sane love for the broken world.
Stalin, at one point, becomes his father-surrogate; Aunt Elena’s logic ("If you do both it’s like being either a man or a woman") feels eerily contemporary; and a cardboard cutout of General Bratu full of explosives becomes the most trustworthy character.
It’s a tale of motherhood, exile, chicken metaphysics, and the perverse beauty of defiant uselessness. If there’s an allegory, it’s this: to survive history’s absurdity, one must become absurd—flamboyantly, dangerously, beautifully absurd.
There are books that explain history, and there are books that mutate it. Codrescu’s genius? Entirely involuntary. It’s lush, grotesque, and hilariously poetic — Proust rewritten by a dissident raised on onion soup and unresolved trauma.
"...The decaying stone castle smelled like a thousand years of suppressed shivers. The sweat of condensation, the sweets of condescension. Apples, pears, preserves, wines in lost cellars in unknown areas of the castle which his grandmother didn’t remember. Old leather harnesses. Tons of trunks, pictures, old metal. Special zero-degree creatures stuck between air molecules. Leaves in the fall. Smells of political conversations. Cheese, smoke and fires. And floating under and over everything like a thin, melodious veil, the smell of chickenshit, the eternal, marvelous smell of chickenshit...”
The book is a memoir only in the loosest sense: Borges meets Bukowski in Bucharest. The "genius" is born mid-brawl at a table strewn with matzoh soup and diamond bribes, enters the world howling in German, Hungarian, Chickenese, and Freud, and spends the next decades trying to unlearn language’s betrayal and relearn the ancient dialect of mother-love.
“She had what she called ‘palpitations,’ a series of flutters which she described with movements of her fingertips like wings,” he writes, and these spectral flutters haunt every scene, whether it’s the grandmother in a haunted Transylvanian castle tracing lumps across her body, or Use the monstrous nanny, steaming with repressed vengeance and onion soup.
The scenes blur gloriously: a boy conjuring armies of ghosts with a three-word spell; a gendarme who venerates the sun like it’s a delinquent god; a castle rotting under the weight of a thousand years of chicken shit, Baronial regret, and feudal gaslighting; a poetry teacher explaining to his mother, over TV dinners and reproachful silences, why he cannot stop writing books that make no money. “Excuse me, sun! I didn’t mean it!” he pleads after blaspheming the sky, and the sun, it seems, does not forgive lightly.
Codrescu, a Romanian-born poet, journalist, and exile-satirist, carries his exile like a drunken limb: inconvenient, hilarious, grotesquely articulate.
The “involuntary genius” is not a genius in the intellectual sense (though he’s infuriatingly clever), but a mutant composite of century, family, ideology, and language.
“There was another kind of me inside,” he confesses, “it writes poetry. It walks on strange streets. It’s half-drunk, half-sober. It loves what it sees.” That’s the book in a sentence: feral, half-sane love for the broken world.
Stalin, at one point, becomes his father-surrogate; Aunt Elena’s logic ("If you do both it’s like being either a man or a woman") feels eerily contemporary; and a cardboard cutout of General Bratu full of explosives becomes the most trustworthy character.
It’s a tale of motherhood, exile, chicken metaphysics, and the perverse beauty of defiant uselessness. If there’s an allegory, it’s this: to survive history’s absurdity, one must become absurd—flamboyantly, dangerously, beautifully absurd.
There are books that explain history, and there are books that mutate it. Codrescu’s genius? Entirely involuntary. It’s lush, grotesque, and hilariously poetic — Proust rewritten by a dissident raised on onion soup and unresolved trauma.
"...The decaying stone castle smelled like a thousand years of suppressed shivers. The sweat of condensation, the sweets of condescension. Apples, pears, preserves, wines in lost cellars in unknown areas of the castle which his grandmother didn’t remember. Old leather harnesses. Tons of trunks, pictures, old metal. Special zero-degree creatures stuck between air molecules. Leaves in the fall. Smells of political conversations. Cheese, smoke and fires. And floating under and over everything like a thin, melodious veil, the smell of chickenshit, the eternal, marvelous smell of chickenshit...”
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