From a small bedroom overlooking Ștefan cel Mare in Bucharest, a boy stands with his bare feet on the radiator, gazing out at the city all through the night. What he observes could be seen by anyone in a similar position, but as he looks, his imagination begins to shape what we see in a unique way.
Within the mind of this boy’s singular vision, “not only did I watch the city, but it too spied on me, it too dreamed me”. The illusions released by the grotesque contortions of his fever dreams transport us from an apparent objective reality into a subjectivity that is his alone: “I was a mélange of flesh, stone, cephalo-spinal fluid, I-beams and urine, supported by vertebrae and concrete posts, animated by statues and obsessions, and digested through intestines and steam pipes, making the city and me a single being.”
To describe the extravagant conceptions of Mircea, the boy, or Cărtărescu, the writer, as surrealistic seems obvious, but there is also a sense in which the novel presents a form of realism that incorporates aspects of life rarely found in the conventional realist novel. The oneiric state is common to us all, especially in the form of the hypnopompic liminality we experience when we are neither fully awake nor asleep.
The dream world exists beyond our control, yet it is an integral part of our daily experience. The daydream fluidity that transports us between our surroundings and the jumble of worries, fantasies, desires and memories that constitute our ever-altering thoughts is also our true experience. That “continuum of reality-hallucination-dream” forms the structure and essence of this extraordinary novel.
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Blinding, the first volume of Cărtărescu’s Orbitor trilogy, was originally published in Romania in 1996. The subtitle, The Left Wing, refers to the guiding design and motif of the novel as a butterfly, and butterflies in many forms, enormous or normal-sized, beautiful or grotesque – placing an egg in the brain of a character, for example – appear throughout the novel.
This translation of the novel was first made available by Archipelago Books in 2013, but the “Body” and “Right Wing” of the butterfly were never published. The great news for those who have longed for the complete trilogy to be available is that Penguin have commissioned the translator Sean Cotter to complete it.
A central preoccupation for Cărtărescu is the incredible complexity of the human body. He describes it in both precise and fantastical detail, appreciating the intricate functions necessary for keeping us alive and the tiny neural impulses that drive our thoughts and actions.
This requires a specialised vocabulary, which is just one aspect of Sean Cotter’s exceptional translation. So, when Maria – Mircea’s mother, a continual presence in the book – decides to press the button on a lift shaft that alone remains from a building bombed 10 years previously, “Her finger had to touch the button, leaving a fine filigreed network of papillary ridges. She held out her hand with such grace that it seemed to cascade from her body, like a pseudopodium full of florescent corpuscles.”
At that stage of the novel, Maria has just left a cinema. Films have become her favourite activity in the free time she has when not working in a factory. Her absorption in the on-screen characters’ lives is so intense that she has developed the ability to change their dialogue and transform whole scenes to her preferred outcome. A finesse similar to Mircea’s when he describes a scene involving his forebears which he processes through the filtration system of his vivid imaginings so that, “in fact, they weren’t building houses, plowing land or planting seeds on anything more than a grey speck in a great-grandson’s right patial lobe ... all their existence and striving in the world was just as fleeting and illusory as that fragment of anatomy in the mind that dreamed them”.
The body of work by Cărtărescu translated into English includes Solenoid, another darkly exuberant work of riotous and instinctive invention translated by Cotter, which won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024. In that novel, as in this one, dreams bleed into the woken state without either being entirely stable. Nobody better probes the disconcerting vulnerability of our existence, always, ultimately, alone; looking on a bewildering world that refuses to console us, and no writer does it with such creative intelligence. The next two volumes can’t arrive soon enough.
