What happens when memory ceases to be a record of the past and becomes a hallucinatory map of a city coming alive?

Blinding (Volume 1: The Left Wing) is the opening chapter of Mircea Cărtărescu’s magnum opus, the Orbitor trilogy. Part visceral memoir, part mystical journey, the novel transforms Bucharest into a living, breathing organism. The narrator revisits his childhood, the prehistory of his family, and the rise of the Communist regime, but through a lens where reality melts into the surreal.

In this kaleidoscopic world, secret police, traveling circuses, and whispering butterflies coexist with the mundane. It is a literary sensation that challenges the boundaries of fiction, taking the reader on a pilgrimage through hidden passageways of the mind to a place that is eerily familiar yet profoundly new.