This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Every year around the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, several names recur as likely contenders. Some are frankly implausible: Haruki Murakami’s work is too thin; Can Xue’s name could only be suggested by someone who hasn’t read her maddeningly opaque stories. Last year, one regular Nobel bridesmaid made it to the altar: Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai.
Another regular runner is Romania’s Mircea Cărtărescu and, for my money, a strong bet. His presence in UK publishing has been scant so far — his last novel Solenoid was published here only after it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize — but now Penguin is giving us his magnum opus, Blinding, a trilogy first published in Romania between 1996 and 2007.
The subtitle of the first part, Blinding: The Left Wing, translated by Cărtărescu’s regular collaborator Sean Cotter, refers not to politics but to the parts of a butterfly. (The Body and The Right Wing will follow.) Butterflies are all over this book — as a birthmark, as fabric for a dress or meat for food — but then, everything is all over this book. Abundance is Cărtărescu’s way.
His technique is to blend personal memoir, histories of Romania and in particular Bucharest (“my city, my alter ego”) and flights of fantastical imagination. He telescopes in and out from internal reckoning to exterior — and even extraterrestrial — interests. “I sit in my chair for a little while longer, in my attic with the oval window, on the edge of a galaxy,” he begins one chapter.
The book opens in a Proustian flourish, with sleep and dreams, as the narrator recalls his past, as “I try to put my disorder into thought”. Yet it remains disordered, if beautifully rendered: he reflects on the wonder of being alive, he watches a bug crawl across the page of a book in a passage of great beauty — “it did not know that its world meant something, that it could be read” — and he invents a history of his mother’s ancestors, the Bradislavs. This account runs for two dozen pages, yet, as he acknowledges, all their stories now are nothing more than “a gray speck in a great-grandson’s front parietal lobe”.
He never lets the reader get bored, but he also challenges us to keep up. Soon we switch to a new narrative, from the viewpoint of his mother Maria and her youth working with her sister as a seamstress. Again rich details fill the pages — the eroticism of a leggy nightclub singer, sex in a Nazi uniform — and we don’t know where we’re heading next. When Maria and her sister return to their collapsed street following a bombing in Bucharest, it reads like a representation of Cărtărescu’s determination to remake the city in his own image.
And one reason we don’t know where we’re heading next is because neither does he. “The past is everything, the future nothing,” the narrator writes, and Cărtărescu is known for his unique approach to composition: he never goes back or edits his work. “It’s a process of continuous inspiration,” he has said. “I prefer to surprise myself on every page, because otherwise where would be the pleasure to write?”
He is a unique figure, once on the cultural edge of his country’s “blue jeans generation”, inspired by Western culture, now a grand statesman of Romanian literature. His work is unique too. His books — a catalogue of the workings of his mind — share an aim with another Nobel favourite, Australian Gerald Murnane, but where Murnane’s approach is austere and controlled, Cărtărescu’s is expansive and baroque. He is detailed — he can spend two pages describing the act of pressing a lift button — and sometimes confounding, but never boring.
Blinding: The Left Wing, like Solenoid or his early novel Nostalgia, is a book effectively impossible to summarise in review. So to an extent you have to take my word for it that it is mesmerising, charming and surprising. The only way to experience it is to read it — there’s nothing at all like it out there.
The novel of adultery, as practised by John Updike in New England or by Margaret Drabble in the Home Counties, has long been a cliché of literary fiction. How to make it new? American novelist Erin Somers might have found one solution with her second novel The Ten Year Affair.
The eye of the story is Cora, a married mother who meets another man, Sam, at a baby group. They bond over contempt for the other parents: one mum who force-feeds broccoli to her unwilling child, another who overshares. “I had an orgasm during labour. Or anyway, I was close.”
Cora is immediately attracted to Sam, but he resists her advances. And so, the timeline of her life splits in two. In reality, she forges a friendship with Sam and his wife; whilst in her imagination, the two pursue a passionate affair. The story cycles between reality and fantasy and shows how life alters to fit around the changes. So when Cora experiences grief following the deaths of her husband’s parents, her friendship with Sam is deepened, but her affair with him damaged.
Later, chewy moral questions arise, when Cora finds herself in the uneasy role of moral advisor to Sam’s wife Jules, who starts to fall out of love with him. Cora must determine which world she really lives in.
This is a bright, smart novel that skewers a particular world of bullshit jobs and the modern economy: Sam is “chief storytelling officer at a startup that wanted to disrupt mortgages”, whilst Cora returns from maternity leave to find that she can delete 30,000 unread emails without it making any difference.
But there are deeper concerns too. When Cora spends so much of her time in an imaginary world, will she always be able to tell it apart from reality? What she finds, in the end, is what Kurt Vonnegut identified as the theme to his novel Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Francis King is a name not much heard these days, but before his death 15 years ago he was a prominent figure in the literary world. Or perhaps prominent is not it: the man who published more than 30 novels and was a long-standing fiction and drama critic for the Telegraph was not commercially successful. Probably this is because he wrote books too varied to market easily.
But good things never die, and, now, his 1970 novel A Domestic Animal is reissued by the redoubtable McNally Editions. It is a love story, narrated by ageing English novelist Dick Thompson, and the object of his affection is a thirtysomething Italian footballer turned philosophy student, Antonio, who has come to board with him whilst studying at the local university.
“Italians — let’s face it — are not really domestic animals,” one female confidante says to Dick, who responds, “No. They are predators.” But Dick — who is introduced to Antonio as “a confirmed bachelor” — is the one with prey in his sights. He falls, hard, for this young man of enormous appetites for everything, a man who is “one of those people to whom everyone says yes’.
At first, writes Dick, “I was unaware of any sexuality in the attraction he exerted on me.” And indeed his interest in Antonio seems as much a form of aesthetic delight — the sort of pleasure he would take in a very good sentence — as of lust. But if this blindness to his own sexual impulse seems curious to 21st-century readers, it helps to place the novel in its time — a few years after the decriminalisation of homosexual acts — as do the quaint italics that swag exotic words like pasta or Dick’s unflinching reference to his own kind as “inverts”.
What distinguishes the book is King’s clarity of expression in his account of Dick’s turbulent emotions. How close Antonio is, as a lodger and yet how far! “Since love,” Dick reflects, “is after all a confidence trick … based on confidence in oneself, this may perhaps explain the irony of why I have always found it so easy to have the women I have wanted so little and so difficult to have the men I have wanted so much.”
Dick adopts multiple roles: the unrequited lover, but also the jilted partner, picking arguments with Antonio when he lies to him trivially about a meeting. And Antonio, who has a wife at home and has picked up a mistress in England, sees something Dick doesn’t: that “we are like each other. We are both egotists.”
But the forward momentum of the story requires that this “foolish old queen who has lost his head over a handsome and normal Italian” must confront his passion with Antonio — and this drives the story to developments both surprising and inevitable.
A Domestic Animal, in its first form, attracted legal threats from an MP on whom one character was based, and King had to sell his home to cover the costs. But he got another novel out of that, titled The Action. On a good writer — and King was a very good writer — nothing is ever wasted.
