Blinding: The Left Wing
Mircea Cartarescu author Sean Cotter translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Published:13th Nov '25
Should be back in stock very soon

'Visionary... almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
'This is writing of overwhelming accomplishment' Chris Power, Observer
An enthralling, hallucinatory masterwork by one of Central Europe’s most celebrated novelists
‘We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings’
Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards.
Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.
Visionary, surreal, exhilarating... Almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake -- Boyd Tonkin * Financial Times *
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 *
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 *
Vivid, sumptuous... a rich, disturbing exploration of our sense of time * TLS *
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 *
A wild history of Bucharest in the 20th century... Blinding reawakens the perceptual imagination and gifts us new insight * Literary Review *
Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult * TLS *
One of the greatest literary adventurers in contemporary literature * El Pais *
Gripping, impassioned, unexpected--the qualities that the best in literature possesses * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
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
ISBN: 9780241754894
Dimensions: 216mm x 136mm x 33mm
Weight: 433g
432 pages