Synopsis
From the New York Times best-selling author Paul Theroux, Blinding Light is a slyly satirical novel of manners and mind expansion. Slade Steadman, a writer who has lost his chops, sets out for the Ecuadorian jungle with his ex-girlfriend in search of inspiration and a rare hallucinogen. The drug, once found, heightens both his powers of perception and his libido, but it also leaves him with an unfortunate side effect: periodic blindness. Unable to resist the insights that enable him to write again, Steadman spends the next year of his life in thrall to his psychedelic muse and his erotic fantasies, with consequences that are both ecstatic and disastrous.
The New York Times - Hari Kunzru
Theroux describes Steadman's perceptual enhancement in prose that is fluent and often arresting. The figure of the blind man, as a mythic and poetic archetype, resonates throughout. As an exploration of the visual rhetoric that dominates Western thinking about creativity and knowledge, especially knowledge of self, Blinding Light is a bravura performance. Theroux is often very funny about the vanity and pomposity of his writer hero.