Blinding: The Left Wing

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