[Solenoid is] “a masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written.”

 – Kirkus Reviews

“Solenoid. . . is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. . .That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel’s sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. . . In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself.”

 – The New York Times

“The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cărtărescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical.” 

 – Wall Street Journal

“Cărtărescu’s themes are immense. They reveal to us a secret Bucharest, folded into underground passages far from the imperious summons of history, which never stops calling to us.”

 – Le Monde

“Cărtărescu’s phantasmagorical world [in Blinding] is similar to Dalí’s dreamscapes.”

 – Kirkus Reviews

“A writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few.”

 – Andrei Codrescu

“His novel [Blinding] is nothing less than a cathedral of imagination and erudition … This masterwork of mannerism is guaranteed to catapult Mircea Cartarescu to the highest echelons of European literature.”

 – Neue Zürcher Zeitung

[Nostalgia is] “gripping, impassioned, unexpected.”

 – Los Angeles Times

“Solenoid is ambitious, esoteric, grotesque, sometimes grisly, and constantly brandishing a surly egotism worthy of Dostoevsky’s underground man. It could well be one of the most successful pieces of fabulism in recent decades.”

 – Asymptote