Nostalgia

Nostalgia comprises three short(ish) stories, and two novellas, each told by a different first-person narrator. A censored version (entitled Visul, ‘The Dream’) appeared in 1989 and the full work as Nostalgia in 1993. An English version was not available until Julian Semilian’s 2005 translation. A shallow internet search brought up two reviews, both of which seemed to miss essential points of the work. Kirkus compared Cărtărescu’s “phantasmagorical world” to Dalí’s images, but this loses the deep-seated uncanniness of Cărtărescu’s writing, its existential uneasiness within the familiar; de Chirico would be a better choice, or Carrington. A Spectator review bizarrely compared Cărtărescu to C.S. Lewis, saying Nostalgia summoned “the wonder and terror of a Danubian Narnia”. Tell me you never read fantasy without telling me you never read fantasy.returnreturnThe stories are impressive, even dazzling, but marred by pervasive essentialist sexism. The female characters are thinly sketched in flat, minor roles, and even in 'The Twins', where one of the main characters is (mainly) a woman, her whole life is dominated by her romantic relationships. The male narrator of 'The Twins' doesn’t flinch from open misogyny when he recalls the childhood experience of being naked with his friend Marcela: “the incipience of contempt insinuated itself in me, while in her, it was the beginning of humility and veneration”. There is also a tendency to use animals as sacrificial victims—itself not an unusual ‘feminine’ role—whose trauma or death either reveals something about the hero, or teaches him An Important Lesson. Such reliance on convenient stereotypes of any ‘other’ acting as a foil to or a mirror of the main character makes for tedious reading. returnreturnThis problematic aspect is outweighed by the quality of what remains. Cărtărescu is an outstanding writer, and his imagination, both wild and elegant, is at its most confident and impressive in the second half of 'The Twins' and especially in 'The Architect', in which the effect of that most banal of sounds, the car-horn, on the central character has, ultimately, cosmic repercussions. The first and least inter-connected story, 'The Roulette Player', has a very distinct charm, gritty, violent, and fantastical, like a Dostoyevskian Bulgakov. returnreturnNostalgia is described by its author as a novel, because the stories are connected ‘subterraneously’. It is not a novel in the sense of a continuous narrative, but the locations feel sustained, like the relationship between the characters and their material environment. All the stories take place in Bucharest, but in its unorthodox, unofficial places – alleys between home and school, the secret locations of an illicit sport, the backrooms of a museum. The environment is uncanny; there is a sense that the demi-monde locations are sorcerous in their effects on the characters. Although recollections of youth form much of the narrative, the original Romanian title is more apt, resonating as it does with intensity of experience, suspension of logic, and dismissal of explanation, rather than with a desire to return to a fondly-remembered past.