Blinding

Title:

Blinding

Author:

Cartarescu, Mircea

Cotter, Sean

Subject:

Literature

Historical Fiction

Fiction

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.

Publisher:

Archipelago

Steerforth Press

Date:

2013/11/12

Digital Format:

HTML

ADOBE EPUB

Language:

English

Vendor:

Libby

Summary

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.

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

A good sense of time and place is the highlight of this overstuffed novel set in 20th century Romania-volume one of a trilogy that continues with Blinding: The Body and Blinding: The Right Wing. Mircea, a sensitive teenager, spends a great deal of time looking out the window of his bedroom in Bucharest. His father is often away and he feels little attachment to his mother, Maria. The novel's second part depicts Maria as a 15-year-old in 1955 as she leads an impoverished but colorful life. She works as an apprentice tailor, sharing a bed with her 17-year-old sister, Vasilica. The two young women attend inexpensive neighborhood movie theaters as a respite from the long hours they spend sewing. In part three, Mircea is sent to a hospital, where his treatment includes sessions with a blind masseur, and he is brought face-to-face with his fellow patients' suffering. Some of Cartarescu's descriptions are evocative, as when he writes of military officers who are "the quintessence of both Hercule Poirot and the mythological Hercules." But the author is rarely satisfied with one word when he can use a hundred, and his story struggles mightily not to drown in a sea of excess verbiage. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.