Mircea Cartarescu Releases BLINDING
By: Christina Mancuso Aug. 08, 2013
Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea C?rt?rescu's Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a best-seller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist's childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the jazz underworld of New Orleans, and the installation of the Communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from its strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed.
MIRCEA C?RT?RESCU 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. C?rt?rescu 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. His novel Nostalgia was published by New Directions. He currently lives in Bucharest.
SEAN COTTER's translations from the Romanian include Nichita St?nescu's Best Translated Book Award-winning Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems (Archipelago), Liliana Ursu'sLightwall and Nichita Danilov's Second-hand Souls. His essays, articles, and translations have appeared in Conjunctions, Two Lines, and Translation Review. He is Associate Professor of Literature and Literary Translation at the University of Texas at Dallas, Center for Translation Studies.
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