Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards. Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s ‘Blinding’ is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.