Romanian novelist and poet Mircea Cărtărescu's acclaimed Blinding trilogy is finally being published in the UK, nearly 30 years after its first volume appeared in Romanian. The first part, The Left Wing, has been released by Penguin, introducing English-speaking readers to a work critics voted Romania's novel of the decade in 2010.
Cărtărescu, who has been mooted as a future Nobel literature laureate, shares a fascination with butterflies with his literary hero Vladimir Nabokov. The trilogy is conceived as a butterfly in shape, with the first and third parts as wings and the middle book as the body. Surreal imagery abounds, including a scene where medieval villagers discover giant butterflies frozen under the Danube ice and boil them for a feast.
The author describes the work as 'a stylistic and literary revenge against the people who stole my youth'. Growing up under communist rule in Romania, Cărtărescu was a key figure in the 'blue jeans generation', a beatnik-influenced cultural movement. After the 1989 revolution, he felt liberated, spending much of his post-Cold War life abroad.
The trilogy, which took 14 years to complete, has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses for its treatment of Bucharest as a character. Cărtărescu, now based in the Romanian capital, wrote most of the 1,400-page work outside the country.
