If you ever wondered what Bucharest looks like through the eyes of someone who accidentally swallowed a dictionary and then stared too long at a butterfly, the Financial Times has provided the answer. Their review of Cărtărescu’s Blinding reads less like literary criticism and more like a travel guide written during a slow, hallucinatory fever.
According to the reviewer, Bucharest is not a city but an “inextricable triple empire of reality-hallucination-dream.”
In travel language, this simply means:
“Expect weirdness. And traffic.”
FT describes the author’s childhood streets as an “intoxicating brew to be sipped rather than gulped,” which is exactly how every Romanian will tell you to handle țuică. Close enough. The city’s spring air is “scented,” its winter snow “sooty,” and everything in between apparently flutters with “iridescent butterflies flapping symbol-heavy wings.”
Honey, those are just moths hitting the tram lights.
What follows is the sort of literary detour that would terrify a normal tourist but deeply amuse a Romanian. Suddenly, between the broken sidewalks and communist blocks, the reviewer sees:
- underground caverns
- mystical priests
- jazz musicians from New Orleans
- prophetic visions
- circus conspiracies
- Baroque Gothic hallucinations
All of this, in what is essentially a city where half the ATMs still paper-jam.
But the reviewer is committed. FT insists that Bucharest is a place where dreams blend with memory, reality bends, and time becomes a philosophical suggestion. It is dramatic, unnecessary, and absolutely perfect as a parody of European travel writing.
FT even manages to transform the author’s family history into a form of cultural tourism. The mother, Maria — factory worker, survivor, anchor — becomes a symbol of the “heat, hardship, and holiness” of Romanian life. The relatives in the Securitate chasing circus conspiracies?
A bold new tour option:
“Paranoid Dictatorship Walking Tour — Sundays at noon.”
And just when you think FT has exhausted every possible metaphor, FT ends with angels. Literal angels. FT assures the reader that beneath all the grime and trauma, Bucharest glows with “the certainty of our angelic nature.”
Translation: “Romanians are good people. Just don’t look directly at the infrastructure.”
In the end, the FT review accidentally does what all good travel writing should: it makes Bucharest unforgettable.
Not because of the metaphors, or the hallucinated butterflies, or the underground jazz cults — but because the reviewer’s sheer dramatic intensity turns an already fascinating city into a mythic fever dream.
Visit Bucharest.
Eat, walk, argue, stare at old buildings, get lost at least once, and ignore the butterflies.
The city is magical enough without them. And don’t, please just don’t, read the FT.