Blinding: Volume 1 Paperback – 15 October 2013

Good book and good delivery

It’s hard to know where to begin with Mircea Cărtărescu brilliant memoir, Blinding. I don’t really think calling it a memoir is really accurate as more often than not it reads like anything but a memoir. Before I bought the book I saw one of the captions from Kirkus review that compares the book to a Dali dreamscape; now after having finished the book that description rings true. The book bombards the reader with so many fantastic descriptions and dream images that I felt like I was being assaulted by Mircea Cărtărescu’s subconscious. Make no mistake, this is a serious, and incredibly talented writer that we in the U.S have been deprived of until now. With that said this book won’t appeal to everyone. If you are looking for any kind of straightforward narrative you should steer clear of this. There are points where he attempts to tell us bits and pieces, really just fragments of what we imagine were Mircea’s so called real world. There are descriptions of his mother and father and how they met and a really long beautiful piece about his mother and her sister leaving their village and coming to the city to work and their adventures they had there until the war. There is also quite a lot about him being sick as a child and being hospitalized and the effect that may have had on him. But more often than not these fragments from his ordinary life quickly crumble and turn into surreal dreamscapes where giant organic butterflies give birth to gods who give birth to worlds and time and space where this talented Romanian writer sits marveling over it all. There are at least two other volumes to this wonderful memoir-or anti-memoir and I will be eagerly waiting for their U.S release!

Beautifully written, a book like no other in the world, mesmerizing images will follow you for a long time.

Mircea Cartarescu is a genius at wordsmithing. His vocabulary exceeds the most inclusive dictionary. I had to use the dictionary feature on my kindle almost on every page. Luckily I am a biologist and familiar with all the physiological and biological words that he used in unique ways. I think he is a master at that and it’s the reason I was able to finish the book as it was more personal fantasy then reality. The memoir follows Mircea and Mother Maria with dizzyingl flashbacks and flash forwards. Where am I? Still I was mesmerised by the prose.

This book is an example as a good writer can introduce in a world of dreams, where the great quantity of images loses the lector in a labyrinth of impressions. Particularly if the writer is good as Cartarescu, this effect allows to us to receive this conception by him. Colours and images give sense from an idea of religio, but next they become a war between devils and angels. This world of dream gives origin from the fact that a boy is in hospital for a problem of healt. So this situation gives the possibility of this singular happening.