Mircea Cartarescu (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. Cartarescu 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. The author lives in Bucharest, Romania.
"Romania's greatest living writer."
-- Andrew Solomon, The New Yorker
"Blinding asks much from readers as it shifts between tender family
history, Ceaușescu-era satire and visionary fantasies that recalls
William S Burroughs. Stay with him: epiphanies and beauties abound
in this deliriously ambitious work."
-- A Fiction in Translation Book of the Year, The Independent
"...a hot tip for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year....
Cartarescu demands much as he scrambles memory, satire, fantasy and
near-mystical speculation, but amply rewards your commitment. [...]
Above all, Blinding insists that memory can make a world. 'The past
is everything, the future nothing.' From that past – which
stretches back to encompass all of human history – Cartarescu has
fashioned a novel of visionary intensity. Bring on the next
instalment – soon."
-- Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
"As Borges said when Joyce’s Ulysses was published, this text does
not aspire to be a novel, but a cathedral...A novel with a strong
original voice, a unique flavor, and well-crafted poetic language,
Blinding is a delight and a surprise, a major discovery of this
year. This literary experience will bring new attention to
Romanian literature, a cultural destination that for decades eluded
North American audiences."
-- Los Angeles Review of Books
"...Cartarescu astounds without resorting to showiness, and
the sheer energy and exuberance of his language
is intoxicating. What’s more, his extra-sensory vision of
Bucharest (and beyond) is mind-expanding."
-- Minneapolis Star Tribune"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"Nothing can prepare you for the scope and
ambition of Blinding, the first volume of Romanian author Mircea
Cărtărescu’s acclaimed trilogy. A phantasmagorical blend of
fiction, memoir, surrealism, entomology, war, sex, death and
destruction, the novel is, to use its own words, on a 'a continuum
of reality-hallucination-dream."
-- Bookforum
"It is testament to translator Sean Cotter’s skill that this
English version fairly vibrates with immediacy, its jungle-cat
vigor apparent even during the book’s melancholy moods. Reading
Blinding, the tears we feel on our face are unmistakably
Cartarescu’s, and it is Cartarescu’s hand we feel tugging us down
the twisting lanes between apartment towers, out to the far
fringes of his personal past, whether
remembered, reconstructed, or marvelously and eloquently
re-imagined." -- Brooklyn Paper
"For English readers, the arrival of Blinding: Volume 1 is a
great gift from the gods of altered reality. . . . It is tempting,
when encountering a new translation, to compare the foreign author
with someone more familiar ... those who reach into nightmares to
capture the monsters in our waking lives. Still, Cărtărescu’s
scope and ambition, soaring to metafiction and beyond,
surpasses most of these comparisons."
-- KGB Bar Lit Magazine
"Cartarescu’s first volume concludes with a spiritual call-to-arms,
in which creativity and fertility are one and the same. This vision
imparts beauty to this destiny, but there are also intimations
throughout of power misused, of violence, of beings struggling for
connection in the face of obstacles."
--Kristine Rabberman (The Quarterly Conversation)
"Cartarescu's themes are immense.... They reveal to us a secret
Bucharest, folded into underground passages far from the imperious
summons of history, which never stops calling to us."
--Le Monde (France)
"Cartarescu's phantasmagorical world is similar to Dalí's
dreamscapes."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Gripping, impassioned, unexpected--the qualities that the best in
literature possesses."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"If George Lucas were a poet, this is how he would write."
-- New York Sun
"At once philosophical and historical, the novel is full of fresh
insights and remarkable turns of phrase. Sean Cotter’s translation
only adds to the book’s emotional tenor, since it reads like an
English-language original, and it would not be too surprising to
see this become an American bestseller as well."
-- Hannah Thurman, The Coffin Factory
"...like the Prague of Michal Ajvaz and the Buenos Aires of Borges,
in Cărtărescu’s hand the rooms, gazes, corners, lamps, current
events, political officials, ruins, hallways, and basements of
Bucharest become portals to hidden, dreamlike, distorted, and yet
visceral worlds. Reader, beware: one might veer into them at any
second.... Cărtărescu’s prose, so magically transformed into
English by Cotter, speaks to the reader with a lush and fruitful
honesty. Time and again, he produces imagery you, the reader, are
sure you’ve held in the quiet of your own subconscious, mirrored in
Maria and Mircea’s own search for memories and images of their
pasts."
-- Nathaniel Popkin, Cleaver Magazine
"The stakes of Cartarescu’s literary project are staggering. The
novel seeks to answer the same question that all sacred texts seek
to answer: what does it mean to be alive? What happens to us after
we die? The book is as much a thought experiment as it is an
aesthetic one... Sean Cotter has done a masterful, inspired
job with the translation. The meditative, Baroque rhythms of
Cărtărescu’s Romanian flow into graceful, vigorous
English.... This fantastic, luminous work [...] has
transformed Romanian literature into world and world-class
literature."
-- Carla Baricz, Words Without Borders
"If Cărtărescu wants to see this chaos as conspiracy, then I will
grant him this liberty. He has gained his right to it by the many
spectacular stretches of prose that left me dry-mouthed and eyes
gaping. . . Blinding clearly endeavors to construct a world—one
bizarre and audacious enough to measure up with reality."
-- Scott Esposito, Kenyon Review
"There’s an audience that will devour [Blinding] whole,
licking up every verbal crumb on its 460-plus pages. Fans of
Gabriel Garcia Márquez who aren’t afraid to walk down the the
shadier paths of the magical realist garden, perhaps? . .
. Anyone who appreciates that all works of fiction are
ultimately nothing more than dream palaces projected in print?
Maybe you?"
--James Madison Books
Ask a Question About this Product More... |