Nostalgia - Softcover

Mircea Cartarescu

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811215881 ISBN 13: 9780811215886

Publisher: New Directions, 2005

Synopsis

A stunning translation of one of Romania's foremost authors.

Mircea Cartarescu, born in 1956, is one of Romania's leading novelists and poets. This translation of his 1989 novel Nostalgia, writes Andrei Codrescu, "introduces to English 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 Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few." Like most of his literary contemporaries of the avant-garde Eighties Generation, his major work has been translated into several European languages, with the notable exception, until now, of English.

Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. Although each of its five chapters is separate and stands alone, a thematic, even mesmeric harmony finds itself in children's games, the music of the spheres, humankind's primordial myth-making, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship.

About this title

About the Author:

Mircea Cartarescu (b. 1956) is a Romanian author. He was recipient of the Romanian Writers Union prize in 1994 for Travesti and the Republic of Moldova prize in 1994, among many other awards. His work has been translated into English, French, Spanish, and German.

Julian Semilian is a Romanian-born poet, translator, novelist and filmmaker. He currently teaches film editing at the North Carolina School of the Arts, after a twenty-four-year career as a film editor in Hollywood. Before his translation of Cartarescu’s Nostalgia, he translated Paul Celan’s Romanian Poems (Green Integer).

From Publishers Weekly:

Romania's leading poet plays with ideas of authorship and authority in this collection of five unconnected stories—his English debut—which he contrarily subtitled "a novel," asserting that "each part reflects all the others." Given the author's pedigree, it's disappointing that the book, extracted from its cultural context, loses much of its power. Cartarescu employs postmodern effects—shifting points of view, blurring of dreams and reality, episodes of magical realism—without enlarging in a meaningful way on the experiments of Kafka, Borges or García Márquez (all invoked by the book's narrators). The first story involves a roulette player who survives against astonishing odds and a narrator who admits the roulette player could not have existed, but did, because "there is a place in the world where the impossible is possible, namely in fiction, that is, literature." "The Twins" consists of a fairly banal adolescent romance sandwiched between long descriptions of a man dressing in drag. Occasionally Cartarescu's prose shines, as with the description of a suicide on the pavement in "Mentardy": "his noble profile displaying its contour against a cheery stain, light purple and widening leisurely." But the self-conscious postmodernism of this collection may prove off-putting for American readers accustomed to conventions of realist fiction. (Nov. 29)
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0811215881
• ISBN 13: 9780811215886
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 361