Blinding
Volume 1
by Mircea Cartarescu
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Pub Date Oct 15 2013 | Archive Date Oct 22 2013
Steerforth Press | Archipelago
Description
Advance Praise
"Cărtărescu'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)
"Cărtărescu'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
"[Mircea Cărtărescu is] a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few." --Andrei Codrescu
"A wonderful labyrinth of language and color." --Peter Constantine, PEN Translation Prize-winning translator of Thomas Mann, Sophocles, and Dostoevsky
"Cartarescu is taking Europe by storm, garnering prize after prize in France, Italy, Germany..." --American Review
"Unbridled imagination pairs with a richly atmospheric use of language, blending precision and poetry. Rarely has such dazzling beauty emerged from the crumbling edifice of communism." --Der Stern
"His novel is nothing less than a cathedral of imagination and erudition ... This masterwork of mannerism is guaranteed to catapult Mircea Cartarescu to the highest echelons of European literature." --Neue Zürcher Zeitung
"Cartarescu has the imagination of a prodigious child and the narrative virtuosity of an old master." --Der Spiegel
"The apocalypse of a sepulchral, long-lost world is described in exuberant language. The author's metaphors and symbolism never once strike the wrong chord, and he shows commendable assurance in navigating the complexities of what at times amount to a dozen narrative strands - the reader is kept spellbound from the first page to the last. This writing sings like literature long unsung." --Falter
Marketing Plan
Reading and signing at Rain Taxi Festival of Books, Harbourfront Literary FestivalInterviews with Minneapolis Public Radio, Radio Boston (NPR), Leonard Lopate, CBC, Andrew PatnerDiscussions/Lectures at the University of Chicago, MIT, Barnard, and The New School, BU
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781935744849 |
| PRICE | $24.00 (USD) |
Average rating from 2 members
Featured Reviews
Andrija F, Educator
"And space/time/brain/sex began to rumble. There were monstrosities. There were miracles. A mathematics of the bordello was invented, a sublime defecations, a conceptual vomiting, an angelic retching, a real dream, a dead life."
The book is impossible to describe: it shifts between times (medieval, 1950s, 1960s and I suppose 1990s Romania) and places (Bucharest, New Orleans, etc.), between the city and the body, between the outer and the inner, between the vulgar and the holy, between the high and low, between the human and the inhuman. It is an un/holy mix of hallucination/dream/reality that encompasses the politics of body, state and art in a text that is both repulsive and exciting to read. And indeed, I devoured it with such a relish that I cannot wait for the next two parts of the trilogy to be published.
