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  • Published: 13 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781802069051
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

Blinding: The Left Wing





The first volume of the 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.

Translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter

  • Published: 13 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781802069051
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

Also by Mircea Cartarescu

See all

Praise for Blinding: The Left Wing

Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult

TLS

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

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

The Los Angeles Review

Gripping, impassioned, unexpected--the qualities that the best in literature possesses

Los Angeles Times Book Review

In this wise, stunning novel, everything is divided: the narrator; the history through which that narrator lives; the very city of Bucharest. Unlike many authors who play at the edges of what makes fiction fictive or what can be said to constitute reality, Cartarescu manages to keep his profundity engaging, his irony humorous, his wit acid but not cruel

Andrew Solomon

One of the greatest literary adventurers in contemporary literature

El Pais

Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult

TLS

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

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

The Los Angeles Review

Gripping, impassioned, unexpected--the qualities that the best in literature possesses

Los Angeles Times Book Review

In this wise, stunning novel, everything is divided: the narrator; the history through which that narrator lives; the very city of Bucharest. Unlike many authors who play at the edges of what makes fiction fictive or what can be said to constitute reality, Cartarescu manages to keep his profundity engaging, his irony humorous, his wit acid but not cruel

Andrew Solomon

One of the greatest literary adventurers in contemporary literature

El Pais