As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours
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n 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.
Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”
The enchantment with papilionoidean genitalia seems fitting. Blinding, Cărtărescu’s trilogy that critics voted Romania’s novel of the decade in 2010, is conceived as a butterfly in shape, with the first and third parts the wings and the middle book the body. In The Left Wing, the first volume which Penguin is publishing almost 30 years after it appeared in Romanian, there are butterflies fluttering on every other page. But they are rarely ethereal beings.
