There were a million people in the street in the middle of Bucharest, everyone was embracing, it was like in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve, you know? Everyone was so happy, there was a real fraternity among people. The day of the revolution-the December 20, 1989-was maybe the happiest day of my life. But we didn’t know that at the time and were very happy. I believed very much in this revolution, which proved to be a postmodern fake: It was a televised revolution that hid a coup d’état. Stuck somewhere in between.īookforum: What was your experience of the revolution like?Ĭărtărescu: I had been naïve, like most of my compatriots. That is, not belonging to the old culture anymore but unable to integrate into the new one. I wrote a poem about it, one of my most well-known poems, called “The West,” where I said I felt like the magi in T. So you can imagine the shock, the dismay, and the happiness that I felt. It was the first new landscape I had ever seen. After 1989 I practically parachuted into New York City. There were many things that were forbidden to us. I didn’t even have a passport, nobody did. I was 33 and I thought that I would spend the rest of my life in prison-the huge prison that Romania was at that time. So I got to see San Francisco, my first choice, and Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York.īookforum: The contrast to Romania in 1990, just after the revolution, must have been extreme.Ĭărtărescu: Yes, I have to admit that I experienced culture shock when I first came here. It was normal at that time for people enrolled in the program to choose five locations in America to visit for a week. I had the opportunity to travel a bit throughout the United States. Though he was struggling with a stubborn cough, it didn’t prevent him from speaking at great length about Europe, the novel, science, memory, and Romania’s lingering post-revolutionary hangover.īookforum: This is not your first time in America, is that right?Ĭărtărescu: I was part of an international writing program in 1990 and I spent two and a half months in Iowa City. At least that was my impression when we met on a recent Saturday night, in a book-lined Brooklyn apartment where Cărtărescu was staying for the New York leg of his American tour. A phantasmagorical blend of fiction, memoir, surrealism, entomology, war, sex, death and destruction, the novel is, to use its own words, on a “a continuum of reality-hallucination-dream.” It’s author, by contrast, is a collected, unassuming man who looks, at moments, like the actor Daniel Day Lewis. Nothing can prepare you for the scope and ambition of Blinding, the first volume of Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu’s acclaimed trilogy.

Blinding mircea cartarescu