Blinding: Book One

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781935744849
Pages: 464
Publication Date: October 1, 2013

Blinding expands inward, plumbing the infinite depths of an individual imagination. It’s as though Cărtărescu has chosen to withdraw from any topical literary or cultural conversation, and that rather than attempting to stitch together a fragmented contemporary reality, he is returning to a time that never actually existed, an imaginary time when all genres were one genre and all discourses one discourse, before everything broke into parts.
—Martin Riker, London Review of Books

In this sad, 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, Cărtărescu manages to keep his profundity engaging, his irony humorous, his wit both acid but not cruel. Here he explores the inevitable narrative of failure—failure of everything in his world and probably in the world at large—to evoke at once melancholic nostalgia and total revulsion, revealing not only the split nature of the writer and everything he writes about, but also the split narrative of the reader, who emerges from the great project of Blinding at once shattered and more acutely connected to experience itself.
—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far and Away

...from the original, Cotter has created a great a book in English, a journey through childhood and hospitalization, a “kaleidoscope world” as described on the book jacket, of “hallucinatory Bucharest” as told by a deeply sympathetic, vital narrator, a character that Cotter interpreted, created in English....Cotter’s sensitivity to language and to what he has interpreted as Cărtărescu’s intentions in his book are what have given us these “linguistic pyrotechnics” in English.
—Elizabeth Harris, Three Percent