Blinding expands inward, plumbing the infinite depths of an individual imagination. It’s as though Cărtărescu has chosen to withdraw from any topical literary or cultural conversation, and that rather than attempting to stitch together a fragmented contemporary reality, he is returning to a time that never actually existed, an imaginary time when all genres were one genre and all discourses one discourse, before everything broke into parts.

...from the original, Cotter has created a great a book in English, a journey through childhood and hospitalization, a “kaleidoscope world” as described on the book jacket, of “hallucinatory Bucharest” as told by a deeply sympathetic, vital narrator, a character that Cotter interpreted, created in English....Cotter’s sensitivity to language and to what he has interpreted as Cărtărescu’s intentions in his book are what have given us these “linguistic pyrotechnics” in English.

Stitched into the multi-stranded fabric of Blinding is a tender, mesmerically precise account of a humble Bucharest upbringing and its formative effects…Above all, Blinding insists that memory can make a world…From that past – which stretches back to encompass all of human history – Cărtărescu has fashioned a novel of visionary intensity. Bring on the next installment – soon.

The reader is invited to embrace this feeling of overwhelming comprehension, this comprehensive vision exceeding life and imagination. As Borges said when Joyce’s Ulysses was published, this text does not aspire to be a novel, but a cathedral.

Visionary, surreal, convoluted, far-reaching (perhaps overreaching), Cărtărescu’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.

Blinding is a fever dream; a baroque hallucinatory journey through a labyrinth of gorgeous language and discovered meaning. It is a memoir and a collection of fantasy scenes woven tight into the Bucharest landscape — a twilight that extends through centuries...a circus of the macabre and misbegotten. I could not put it down and I was continually getting lost, in the best possible way.

Cartarescu’s language, and this magisterial translation by Sean Cotter, can be compared to nothing completely, but is Joycean in it’s scope, with Ishmael Reed’s bop prosody and Thomas Pynchon’s improbable continuity mixed in with Grimm, Kafka and Calvino.

I find it impossible to describe the book further or the events that are chronicled. There is a sense that the story morphs from page to page like fungal growth and develops in the way the pupae of a butterfly that is a recurring theme. The story is liquid and cunning and by the end you are exhausted and exhilarated.

Cartarescu binds together unrestrained fantasy with a precise, poetic language. Seldom have the crumbling curtains of communism brought out such a marvelous Beauty.

With a deft hand Cartarescu crosses every border between organic and inorganic, animal and human, narration and reflection ... and lets loose once again an uncanny plot with immense linguistic power and feverous intensity, which drags the reader along with it like a river bursting its banks.

A gigantic literary coup ... Wild and heedless, here is a still unpruned author on a spiritual quest, for which in its anarchistic rampancy there is currently no equivalent in western literature.

The cosmos of the writer Cartarescu is one in which the conventional slides into the fantastic, in which a few pages and eons later a new milky way will emerge from a horn concert in a cream-colored Dacia.

With Blinding Cartarescu has erected a monument of world literature for Bucharest.

His novel is a cathedral of both imagination and knowledge, a riddle, in which a 40-year-old demonstrates his unique literary potential.... Mircea Cartarescu's masterwork catapults him to the peak of European literature.

The apocalypse of a gloomy, now extinct world is described in an extravagant language, in which the author always hits the right metaphor, and the intertwined, fragmented story, at times made up of a dozen narrations, never becomes exhausting. Literature as it has not appeared for many years. A hymn!

Cărtărescu’s fluid formalism translates all into some of the most imaginative literature since that of the masters mentioned by name in the text (Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar, among others).

Cartarescu's phantasmagorical world is similar to Dalí's dreamscapes.

Cartarescu's is taking Europe by storm, with nostalgia leading the way and garnering prize after prize in France, Italy, German...

Gripping, impassioned, unexpected—the qualities that the best in literature possesses.

If George Lucas were a poet, this is how he would write.

Cartarescu’s magical mystery tour has begun. Memories warp into fantasies and cityscape melts in and out of dreamscape. Segments of realism (the narrator’s family’s history, his country’s Soviet occupation) serve as springboards to great swaths of surrealism, much of it nightmarish (marauding zombie armies, statues that come to life). We get gypsy folklore, bloody legends, close-up anatomical detail and grotesque erotic reveries.

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...For English readers, the arrival of Blinding: Volume 1 is a great gift from the gods of altered reality.

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.

...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.

Sean Cotter has done a masterful, inspired job with the translation. The meditative, Baroque rhythms of Cărtărescu’s Romanian flow into graceful, vigorous English thanks to Cotter...nothing seems gratuitous: language itself, in its long lists and flights of fancy, proves Cărtărescu’s ultimate point about birth. Every human life is a Gospel, every birth an Annunciation...

A best-seller from the day it was published, it’s the first in a trilogy stretching across the poet’s life and the wings of a butterfly to express Cărtărescu’s thrilling, melancholy, and divine understanding of life in Bucharest and beyond.

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.