Then, all of a sudden, "Bucharest exploded outside the lunar blue glass." Cartarescu's magical mystery tour has begun. Our protagonist - who may be the author - is a poet with bad teeth who stares out the window of his attic apartment at night, reflecting on his past. The book's first section is the strongest. We regularly lose our bearings and our purchase on reality, but such disorientation and entanglement keep us rapt and at times transfixed over 400-plus pages. Rather than steer the reader with the aid of something as quaintly prosaic as plot, Cartarescu propels us by plunging into a labyrinthine and phantasmagorical Bucharest and assailing us with a madcap cast and torrent of hallucinatory ideas and imagery.
"Blinding," the latest novel by Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu to be translated into English, is one of those novels.
Some novels are so avant-garde they resist easy synopsis.
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