The first volume of the enthralling, hallucinatory masterwork by one of Central Europe's most celebrated novelists
'We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings'
Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu's childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards.
Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu's Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.
Translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter
About the Author
Mircea Cartarescu was born in Bucharest in 1956. His novels and poetry are widely considered to be the best writing to emerge from post-communist Romania. His books, including the trilogy Blinding, Solenoid and Nostalgia have been translated into over twenty languages. Solenoid was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and he has received many awards, including most recently the Dublin Literary Award, the Thomas Mann Prize and the Prix Formentor.
Sean Cotter is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has received the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Industry Reviews
One of the greatest literary adventurers in contemporary literature
El Pais
Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult
TLS
Cartarescu is one of the great literary voices of Central Europe. He daringly questions our usual way of looking at the world, suggesting that rationalism is merely an attempt to create order. In fact, the world is made up of the nuances of our fantasies
Olga Tokarczuk
In this wise, stunning novel, everything is divided: the narrator; the history through which that narrator lives; the very city of Bucharest. Unlike many authors who play at the edges of what makes fiction fictive or what can be said to constitute reality, Cartarescu manages to keep his profundity engaging, his irony humorous, his wit acid but not cruel
Andrew Solomon
Gripping, impassioned, unexpected--the qualities that the best in literature possesses
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Fluidly translated by Sean Cotter… the book has a cinematic quality that we don’t so much read as drift through — as in an amusement park ride. What fantastic notion, or iteration of metamorphosing insect will pop out and regale us next? If you’re game for a mystical mind-bend, give Blinding a go
The Los Angeles Review
Mircea Cartarescu’s writing is dreamlike in the truest sense... It is an effluence – prose at times decadently grim and at others shimmering and ethereal – that this reader, like a dog, couldn't help but lap up
ArtReview
Vivid, sumptuous... a rich, disturbing exploration of our sense of time
TLS
This is writing of overwhelming accomplishment... Reading Blinding is like sinking into the humus of a mind, a vast, tangled network of memory and fantasy
Chris Power, Observer
Nobody better probes the disconcerting vulnerability of our existence, always, ultimately, alone; looking on a bewildering world that refuses to console us, and no writer does it with such creative intelligence. The next two volumes can't arrive soon enough
Irish Times
A wild history of Bucharest in the 20th century... Blinding reawakens the perceptual imagination and gifts us new insight
Literary Review
Visionary, surreal, exhilarating... Almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake
Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
