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What Orbitor (having read 2 out of 3 volumes) is:

It's the autobiography of Mircea Cărtărescu, born in 1956, growing up in Ceaușescu's Romania with everything that that entails, and eventually deciding to write his autobiography of Mircea Cărtărescu, born in 1956, growing up in...
It's three volumes, roughly 500 pages each, subtitled Left Wing, Body, Right Wing. The central metaphor is a giant butterfly that can only move by flapping its wings: one in the past that cannot be changed or controlled, one in the future that cannot be known, and in the middle a thin, prosaic body of Now that nobody sees, being too busy looking at the colourful wings. Larva, pupa, flight. Feed, digest, write.
It's often quite straight-forward and realistic. It's often anything but. The line between the two gets... blurry.
It's chaos theory; like a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, every tiny detail of life is part of what makes everyone end up where they are.
It's a paradox, much like life in a dictatorship where anyone might be an informant must be: everything is a secret, everything is transparent. Whenever the narrator sees anything, he sees everything; their past and that of their ancestors, every step along the way that brought them here, the endlessly complex wings of Past and Future flapping alongside their everyday bodies. The narrator has compound eyes. Any person, any object down to the simplest fixtures (elevator buttons!), can be used as a starting point to explore the world. He can zoom in endlessly, but like a Mandelbrot set, each story contains itself within itself. Or maybe he's just projecting. It's four-dimensional storytelling to give Pynchon vertigo.
It's unstuck in time.
It's a world where magical thinking works - or at least exists. The first volume is partly set in the once-upon-a-time past, it's all fairy tale and myth, as any history set in central Europe tends to be; the second volume in Mircea's youth, and like all children, his life is so full of both terrors and wonders that it gets both difficult and irrelevant to draw a strict line between reality and imagination (no talking tigers named after philosophers as of yet, though). The third volume...?
It is, you might argue if you're not sick of namedropping, a post-Iron curtain post-Marquez Tristram Shandy done really well.
It's occasionally full-on psychedelic body horror that would make David Cronenberg literally weep blood. (OK, he's David Cronenberg, that's what he always weeps.) At other points, it crosses over into science fiction. There's an entire subplot set in early 20th century New Orleans - you need jazz in a story like this. Anyone arguing that there's something cyberpunkish about the whole setup, dissolving the very idea of a clearly defined human body and a clearly defined human mind as the subject, would get no disagreement from me.
It's both similar and completely different to another huge autobiographical novel, Knausgård's My Struggle; both are the stories of their own creation, autobiography as a way of understanding the world; but where Knausgård starts out with Descartes and draws his solipsist ergos one by one, Cartarescu starts in the other end, submerging himself in everything around him in order to create himself.
It's "an impossible book, an unreadable book" that I can't help but keep reading.
It's about a young man gazing out from a window in a concrete house in Bucharest.
* It's FUN. Hard work. But fun.

Daniel "Skippy" Juster is 14 years old. He's a student at the oldest, and according to some most prestigious, private school in Dublin. And suddenly he keels over and dies in the local donut shop.

Oh, this is a comedy. Sort of.

Then the story rewinds a few months, introduces us to everyone and lets it proceed to the ending we think we already know; Skippy's schoolmates and -enemies, the girls at the girl's school opposite, the teachers, the parents... it's a fantastic gallery of characters Murray introduces us to, where both kids and adults all think they're the hero of the story and act accordingly. Story, yeah. Murray wants to tackle a lot of different issues in this; through his characters, he flirts with science fiction, horror, social realism, religion, etc, all set to a soundtrack of old hymns and tween pop. The story comes to involve teenage pregnancy, drug use, sexual abuse (it's a catholic school, after all, and everyone reads the papers), cultural confusion, generation gaps, marriage and divorce, war and unemployment, and did I mention that the book begins with a 14-year-old boy dying?

(It's still a comedy. Kind of.)

‘What did you expect?’
Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose – this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’ Seeing Farley’s blank look, he elaborates: ‘A direction. A point. A sense that it’s not just a bunch of days piling up on top of each other.

How can I put it... remember when Stephen King tried to be a Real Writer? This is the novel he never knew he dreamed of writing even if he could have. A suspenseful, hilarious, heartbreaking novel, with dozens of different ideas and storylines that actually work and complement each other. Skippy Dies bloats and sprawls over 660 pages, but whether the topic is 14-year-olds geniuses trying to build wormhole generators in their dorm room, a 30-something teacher questioning where his life is going, or ancient Celtic fairy myths, Murray has a reason for every storyline, they all intertwine and complement each other, and he writes it so beautifully - often in a drily humorous but always compassionate tone, occasionally drifting into a delirious, longing tight point of view that becomes even more touching when you close the book and look at the title. Everyone starts out so very sure they know which story they're the hero of, and then it all starts to unravel until they've all had to take a hard look at each other and discovered what story they're really in. It's all so deliciously complicated and so ridiculously simple, all at once.

That the world, in short, is teenaged. It’s quite a frightening admission to have to make. It feels like a capitulation into anarchy, frankly.

Oh, and Skippy dies. That bit's not meant to be funny. But somehow I come away from the novel with a huge smile on my face.

There was always something spooky about Hank Williams. Maybe not in some of his jollier hits - "Hey Good Looking", "Jambalaya", "Lovesick Blues", that lot - but in songs like "Lost Highway", "Alone And Forsaken", "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow", "Six Miles To The Graveyard", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Pictures From Life's Other Side", and of course the last song he ever recorded, "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive". It's as if there were two Hank Williams: the sharply dressed family entertainer, and the haunted storyteller who reported from the same half-ghostly world that would later pop up in Bob Dylan's lyrics, in David Lynch's films, in Cormac McCarthy's books. Maybe it's really there, maybe it's just something we think we hear since we know that one of the most influential popular musicians of the 20th century died 29 years old, broke, thin as a skeleton and packed to the gills with bourbon and morphine in the back of a car stuck in a snowstorm, only months before the rise of rock'n'roll. Everyone loves a good story, and it just fits entirely too well.

Lonely's a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a spell and then makes the sunshine seem even brighter after it travels along. Like when you're far away from home and you miss the people you love and it seems like you're never going to see them again. But you will, and you do, and then you're not lonely anymore.
Lonesome's a whole other thing. Incurable. Terminal. A hole in your heart you could drive a semi truck through. So big and so deep that no amount of money or whiskey or pussy or dope in the whole goddamn world can fill it up because you dug it yourself and you're digging it still, one lie, one disappointment, one broken promise at a time.

So anyway, it's 10 years later now, and Doc is living in the poorest part of San Antonio, among whores, junkies and thieves. Doc was once Dr Ebersole, MD, the man who - among other things - gave Hank Williams his last shot of morphine and sat in the front seat as Hank quietly expired in the back. Now he's lost his license to practice medicine along with his name and he's just Doc, a heroin addict who lives for his daily fixes and pays for them by providing medical services to people who for some reason can't go to the hospital; illegal aliens, criminals with gunshot wounds, prostitutes with venereal diseases, and of course highly illegal abortions. And every time he shoots up, the ghost of Hank Williams comes to visit him and drive him just a little more insane. Because he is insane, right? Surely there's no such thing as ghosts?

But it's 1963, it's Texas, and another American myth is about to be created by Lee Harvey Oswald. And right about the time Jack and Jackie Kennedy step off the plane for the last time to wave at the masses come to greet the first Catholic president, Graciela arrives (Doc asks if he can call her "Grace" and she refuses). She's Mexican, she's 18, she's "in trouble", and after Doc helps her with that, she sticks around to help Doc treat the most wretched members of society... and something happens. Something nobody can quite explain. Surely there's no such thing as miracles anymore? So how come it only takes one touch from Graciela for people to, well, change the way they're living and stop doing all the things that they oughtn't do? And why does that upset Hank's ghost so much?

As a songwriter, Steve Earle has always been at his best when he writes about outsiders, and as a recovering drug addict himself, he knows all too well what he's writing about in his debut novel. And man, does he pull out all of the stops. His prose is feverish, prickly, musical, filled with harsh detail that never romanticizes but also never condemns. This is a cast of people who for the most part, by accident of birth or by their own poor choices, ended up at the ass-end of life,

The way Doc saw things, it was a crapshoot. Where you were born, who your people were—that's all that mattered. Law and morality had nothing to do with it, let alone anything like justice.

addicted, trapped, vilified, supposedly ruined, but still just human beings trying to get from one day to the next. And possibly, maybe, able to make a change - on their own, or by what they tell themselves are miracles.

But underneath all that, to the music of Hank Williams, runs a deeper story. America is a young country, it's why they've always been good at piecing together myths of their own. I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive takes place both in a harshly realistic world and in that half-dreamed world just under it, a hodgepodge of folk heroes from Davey Crockett to Jack Kennedy, ancient Aztec legends and catholic dogma, song lyrics and Burroughs novels, all the stories people piece together out of the memories that haunt them and those around them to figure out who they are and how they can hope for something better. The end result isn't quite a perfect novel, Earle still has a few kinks to work out as a novelist, but it's one of the most inspired ones I've read in a while, and for all its grit and despair, a joy to read.

Part 1 of the Dancers At The End Of Time trilogy which is in turn part of a larger cycle, The Eternal Champion about the same person - or rather, the same archetypical anti-hero - being reborn in different times and contexts. In this particular one, he lives millions of years into the future, in a time when humanity has evolved and devolved to the point where we can do absolutely anything and think of absolutely nothing new - everything's roleplaying, everything's a game, including when they find out that the Universe is about to die; Moorcock might have been shooting for a satire of 70s free love, but it really comes across more like Monty Python's take on Oscar Wilde. Then along comes a time traveller from 1896, and our hero decides, for lack of anything better to do, to fall in what the old stories call "love" with her... which messes things up quite a bit, especially when he has to follow her back to her time. (Which his friends in the future think is very romantic; "like Hitler to Eva", they cry, that story having become just another myth from the past.) Satirical SF is hard to pull off, and there are times when this is really just Crocodile Dundee In The 1,000,000th Century, but then again Moorcock lands enough clever little jabs and jokes that work and make me think of a rougher, craziers Neal Stephenson to make me want to read... well, maybe not all the 100 or so novels he's supposedly written, but I'll probably finish the trilogy at some point.