Mircea Cărtărescu & “Blinding” in Brooklyn

We hope you’ll join us tonight in welcoming Mircea Cărtărescu, bestselling Romanian author of BLINDING, a kaleidoscopic novel tracing a man’s life, from his memories of traveling circuses, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, to the installation of the Communist regime.

Cărtărescu will appear in conversation with Brooklyn writer and critic Eric Banks.

Community Bookstore 143 Seventh Ave. Brooklyn, NY

TONIGHT, Oct. 22, 7pm

Subway Directions: F, B, or Q trains to the 7th Avenue stop 2 or 3 to Grand Army Plaza R to Union Street

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Praise for BLINDING

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.

— Bogdan Suceavă, Los Angeles Review of Books

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.

— Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune

A writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few.

— Andrei Codrescu