The Blind Army

In The Blind Army, David Toscana moves away from the traditional historical novel to create something far more radical – a literary exploration of the imagination and memory. Inspired by a real-life episode – the blinding of Samuil’s soldiers after the Battle of Kluch – the book unfolds as a mosaic of voices, destinies and inner worlds.

With his "unbridled realism", as Toscana himself describes his style, he blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, between tragedy and irony. The result is a novel that is at once reminiscent of a chronicle, a parable and a dream. Instead of a linear narrative, The Blind Army offers a succession of perspectives in which experience takes precedence over explanation, and the event simultaneously disintegrates and is reconstructed in a multitude of different versions. Here there are no heroes in the classical sense, but extraordinary characters cast into the absurdity of existence: blind people who pretend to see; craftsmen who create eyes; a scribe who tries to preserve what history will erase.

A blend of history, humour and poetry, this novel is at once cruel and beautiful, sombre and inspiring.