4.5
Blinding
ByPublisher Description
Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist’s childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, Secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, and the installation of the communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from this strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities5 Reviews
4.5
shelf.seeker
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“Blinding is a journey of self-transformation through which Cărtărescu reaches into his life and the things that he experienced as a child and adolescent, to perhaps make sense of these things. A metafictional marination of Cărtărescu's life that contains bits and pieces of ideas and concepts he elaborated on in Solenoid, though a bit more difficult to grasp.
This is phantasmagoria at its finest, a grotesque reimagining of reality and unreality, a linkage of the dual nature of our lives that is shown through the symbolism of none other than the beautiful butterfly.
What dualism the butterfly shows; rather, it represents both a dualism and a triptych to me, as is to be understood from this, the “Left Wing” of his “Orbitor” trilogy. We can look at this in terms of three (plenty of evidence to support this) or as the duality of nature (both wings) coming together to create or give birth to something changed (the body).
There is quite literally too much to say about this book, and at times it is confusing and disorienting; however, Cărtărescu's writing again blows you away, and leaves one reeling in the face of his and Sean Cotter’s grasp of language and translation.
A theme of particular importance is the idea of memory/dreams in our lives, and how they predestine us to certain things, as Cărtărescu puts it: “[the dream] would repeat dozens of times…and each time after that, sometimes for a week, I dropped everything, sinking completely into my piercing sense of predestination. I was called toward something…” (p. 417)
Time is hazy in the novel, perhaps a method of imbuing the reader with the sensation of dreams and memories, just as we cannot recall some dreams even immediately upon waking.
Another important aspect is creation itself. I do not want to spoil anything but I feel strongly that this entire trilogy is Cărtărescu trying to reconcile the world we know with the one in our minds, from which a world-creating God emerges and is then created by the world it is drawn into (or is it his mind?).
“And any gesture we can make, we make because one day it will be described in a work. We are unable to conceive of, or to experience what will not be written.” (p. 440)
Maybe I rambled a bit; maybe I was incoherent; but this work, as part of a trilogy, is naturally going to be difficult to process on its own. To say I am eager for the other novels to be published is an understatement.”Bryan
Created 3 months agoShare
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arha
Created 7 months agoShare
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“4.5 stars”
tupperwarelids
Created almost 2 years agoShare
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Mark Baker
Created about 2 years agoShare
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About Mircea Cartarescu
Mircea Cărtărescu (pron: Mer-chay-UH Car-tuh-RESS-cue) was born in 1956 in Bucharest, Romania. One of the foremost contemporary novelists and poets of Romania's 1970s "Blue Jeans Generation," his work was always strongly influenced by American writing in opposition to the official Communist ideology. Cărtărescu is the winner of the Romanian Writers' Union Prize, the Romanian Academy's Prize, and the 1992 nominee for the Prix Mèdicis, among other awards. Though his work has been translated widely throughout Europe, his work is rarely seen in English, until now. He currently lives and teaches in Bucharest, Romania.
Other books by Mircea Cartarescu
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