Blinding

“You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past.”

In Blinding, that haze takes the form of “mole-like wanderings along the continuum of reality-hallucination-dream.” Mircea Cărtărescu tends toward dream and hallucination, taking readers on a journey that is often hard to follow and, despite rich language, lacks for me the connective tissue that defines great stories.

“The dream highways would abruptly pour onto reality’s thoroughfare,” Cărtărescu writes. In this case, dreams flood the thoroughfare, often with body horror. At least two people get their balls ripped off in the first part of the book.

Cărtărescu puts forward relatable reflections like this: “I had always hoped my life would go differently than anyone else’s. That it would have a meaning, a meaning that perhaps I couldn’t grasp, but that was visible from somewhere high up, like a pattern in an immense field. Nothing ought to be accidental.”

And he is right to say that “We live in two media, just as a tree lives in both the air and earth, its branches aerial roots, and its roots underground branches.”

Yet his exploration leaves a bit to be desired. “I am a voyeur of my own childhood and youth, trying to understand what is happening behind the blinds, running from one window to another, misreading what I see in the shadows,” he writes, before bridging to one of the many sexual references in the book: “mistaking an elbow for a breast, mistaking a dress thrown over the back of a chair for exposed buttocks, mistaking black branches against the window for lovers flopping onto the bed.”

Cărtărescu generated a lot of hype with Solenoid and Blinding. He is skilled, but his work just doesn’t ring my bell.