Cărtărescu makes me feel like I'm learning to read for the first time

Just yesterday I finished Theodoros, an absolutely wild ride that was my third Cărtărescu book and it made me reevaluate many things about the act of writing and reading, something I had felt with Solenoid and Nostalgia before that.

Now, I've been reading steadily for the past twenty years, I've published two novels and teach a small writing course at a community center, so all of these questions should be long gone and yet reading Cărtărescu makes me feel like I'm learning to read literature for the first time.

The first is the absolutely boundless imagination, the most bizarre, extreme, funny, oniric, creative scenes and ideas. The ones that make you go "how the hell did he come up with this? why would he choose to write about this?". He claims to write with almost no revisions (I've seen two interviews where he says this) but I honestly can't believe he'd have such an encyclopedic knowledge about so many things. Theodoros in particular has such detailed writing of specific things, like Christian sects in Ethiopia in the 19th century, but who knows, maybe he actually reads and is proficient in the subjects he deals with.

Along those lines, I'm a native Spanish speaker and read him in Spanish. Apparently he's found a really good translator with whom he gets along really well, and that's why there are more books available in Spanish than in English or other languages. And it's impossible not to think about the act of translation, the discussion about how translators' names should be on the cover, being acutely aware the book was written in another (less spoken, weirder, exotic) language and wondering how many brilliant works one is missing out on due to lack of translation. Theodoros in particular has so many hyper specific terms that even reading in my native tongue there were sections with 5-10 words per page I had no idea what they meant and it was such an amazing feeling, like there's still so much to learn even in my own language.

The other thing is when he writes semi autobiographically, which is one thing one as a reader has to try and keep in mind, the writer is not the narrator, the fact that something similar might've happened to him doesn't make the writing better nor worse because it should be able to stand by itself. And yet, every time he speaks in the first person I couldn't help but wonder how much of it was true, even at times realizing I was taking at face value the fact that he had fought a living giant statue or had a room in his house where he can fly.

I guess I'm just thinking how wonderful it is, after decades of reading and thinking you've seen it all, stumbling upon something so left field it's like starting over. It's a beautiful feeling, being reminded of how much is still out there.

So, have you read anything by him? Any other authors that stir something similar in you?