Let us leave the question for the moment.

You might call it an act of exorbitant ego to write a book enshrining your consciousness as the signal event in history, or you might call it the only thing a novelist can honestly do.

The middle section is a mythical fantasia spanning continents, eras, and characters, charting the doings of a sort of eschatological secret society whose prophecy culminates in the insemination of Mircea’s mother. The first novel in the trilogy, called Blinding: The Left Wing, is broken into three sections, and the first and third largely deal with “Mircea’s” childhood in postwar Bucharest. And every birth creates a religion.” If Cărtărescu is in earnest when he writes this, then the Blinding trilogy is nothing less than his attempt to explain the religion that he proposes began with his appearance on Earth. Insofar as I comprehend it-insofar as it can be comprehended-the aim of this octopus-like work, which seems to move in several different directions on each page, may be found in a line near the first volume’s end: “There is no other annunciation than a person’s birth. To their ranks must be added Mircea Cărtărescu’s 1,500-page Blinding trilogy, originally published in Romanian across the decade from 1996 to 2007, and the first book of which has been published in English this year in Sean Cotter’s marvelous translation. It is no exaggeration to call them the works that are driving the novel forward in the twenty-first century, and they are increasingly being studied by students of writing in the United States. These books are not only lengthy and ambitious in their subject matter, but they are also formally challenging and take considerable risks with language: extremely long sentences (some as long as fifty pages or more), the incorporation of arcane terminology, the use of mathematical logic and symbols as a part of the prose. The baroque disasters brought to us by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Mathias Énard’s single-sentence, 500-page novel Zone, telling the 2,000-year history of the Mediterranean. Parallel Stories by Peter Nádas, over a decade in the making and an attempt to sum up all of postwar Eastern Europe. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, an epic of language, geography, politics, and horror. Consider the projects that have appeared here in just the past five years: the My Struggle sextet by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, thousands of pages in length and regularly compared to classics of Modernist literature. Increasingly, the truly audacious novels published in English are not originally written in this language, but are translated into it.

Blinding mircea cartarescu