Nostalgia
By Mircea Cărtărescu
Translated by Julian Semilian
A Review by Elissa Favero
New Dimensions Paperbook Originals;
ISBN: 978-0811215886 |
Mircea Cărtărescu is one of Romania’s most prolific writers across multiple genres. He began his career during the communist dictatorship of Nicholae Ceauşescu, who ruled Romania starting in 1965. Ceauşescu’s tenure was marked by a cult of personality, indoctrination, censorship, and surveillance. Rapid industrialization led, eventually, to austerity and mass shortages of food and fuel. In 1989, protests erupted, and Ceauşescu and his regime were overthrown. That same year, Mircea Cărtărescu’s novel Nostalgia was published in Romania. Though it’s now over thirty years old, Nostalgia seems increasingly relevant in light of current worldwide movements toward authoritarianism. With thousands of Ukrainians now seeking refuge in Romania from war and another repressive regime, there is value in having Cărtărescu’s fine book, Nostalgia, available in translation.
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Life when freedom is curtailed is always an instructive theme for fiction. Romanian-born writer Andrei Codrescu describes the way Nostalgia evokes the “literal darkness of basements and Kafkaesque torture chambers of the regime,” but Cărtărescu’s suggestions of Romania’s dictatorship are never explicit. This is a book about atmospheres and larger questions of existence, not straight politics. Animal torture, though, recurs several times, bringing to mind draconian forms of punishment and the often arbitrary nature of violence under any dictatorship. The distrust sewn among Romanians by Ceauşescu’s use of secret police are evoked in Cărtărescu’s nested and sometimes conflicting narrators and in the repeated invocations of the instability of memory and even reality itself. All is not bleak, however. Throughout the book, horror rubs shoulders with wonder, gritty realities and phantasmagorias collide, and the bleak and occasionally beautiful built environments of Bucharest become something more than just setting. Childhood, what’s more, is shown as a time of heedless cruelty but also exquisite magic, and writing and storytelling are done in the vein of self-conscious performance.
Labeled as a novel, Nostalgia is in fact composed of five separate stories whose geographies, moods, motifs, and sometimes even plotlines connect and reflect back on one another to novelistic effect. Nowhere are Cărtărescu’s themes on better display than in “REM,” the book’s longest story. “REM” begins with a mysterious narrator inspecting a personal library in an apartment on Bucharest’s periphery. Soon enough, we learn of the narrator’s creaturely form and movement: transparent but hairy paws, hooks that drip with venom, and an ability to squeeze under doors and between books. This narrator is lying in wait for Nana, the tenant, and also for her young lover, Vali, an aspiring writer. Through the night, Nana and Vali tell each other stories. It is Nana who is the master spinner, a Scheherazade keeping the danger of the ominous narrator at bay. Her tale is a transportive one. As Vali observes, “Your voice replaces the objects in the room that had been so present to us till now and from which only the ashes remain.”
“REM” continues to move through vivid, surreal scenes, in which Nana and those around her experience terror and amazement. What suffuses “REM” are Nana’s intelligent, detailed descriptions and an attitude that―in the way of children, or adolescents, or maybe just people―oscillates between the tender and the savage. She emerges as a figure able to locate some of her own agency even in the midst of a bleak, broken life largely outside of her control. For those living under the strictures of repression, Nana, I believe, would be a recognizable character.
Surrounding “REM” are four other stories. The short stories of Cărtărescu’s prologue and epilogue, “The Roulette Player” and “The Architect,” act as excellent introduction and conclusion to the book, establishing and summarizing other ideas that course throughout Nostalgia: chance and fate, grotesquery and beauty, and cosmic creation. Near the end of that first story, the narrator of “The Roulette Player” reflects, metanarratively, “But there is a place in the world where the impossible is possible, namely in fiction...”
In a fourth story, “Mentardy,” a group of neighborhood children fall under the spell of a charismatic boy who tells them entrancing, frightening stories and richly imagined theories of the nature of the universe. Here, it is sexual differentiation that creates a kind of terror for the awed narrator. “The Twins,” the book’s fifth story, follows the exhausting vicissitudes of teenage love. The affair culminates in erotic fulfillment, disturbing awakenings at a natural history museum, and a mysterious reversal of identities.
Julian Semilian’s capable translation of Cărtărescu’s stories creates a fitting tone and energy for an English reader of Nostalgia. As the sun sets near the beginning of “The Twins,” for example, we get this sentence: “The room itself, like a cubical and illusory parasite, sucks the bloody outside into the wide stripes on the walls.” (63) In Semilian’s translation, the room itself has become a visceral, preying beast without losing its status as architecture. Other passages are more subtle. In “Mentardy,” Semilian uses the word “endless” to describe a tall woman, suggesting, with that single adjective, the world from a child’s low perspective. (38) In another section in the story, the narrator tells how, “…pale images suddenly erupt on my brain’s silver…” The color suggests both the mind’s grey matter but also the eruption of images that is the silver screen of cinema. Again, Semilian is suggesting so much with his smart diction.
My copy of Nostalgia, printed as a New Directions Paperbook Original, is set with dense type. Cărtărescu, what’s more, writes long paragraphs and often sentences. Don’t let these aesthetics deter you. Throughout these stories, there are scenes and circumstances that reflect the grim realities of Cărtărescu’s world, a world, perhaps, that’s increasingly familiar or at least once more probable. But the book also contains moments of ecstasy and cosmic awe that push past realism. Cărtărescu, I believe is, in part, urging us to let imagination take hold. As he writes in the voice of one of his characters, “You know how to listen…But it all depends on if you know how to dream.”
Labeled as a novel, Nostalgia is in fact composed of five separate stories whose geographies, moods, motifs, and sometimes even plotlines connect and reflect back on one another to novelistic effect. Nowhere are Cărtărescu’s themes on better display than in “REM,” the book’s longest story. “REM” begins with a mysterious narrator inspecting a personal library in an apartment on Bucharest’s periphery. Soon enough, we learn of the narrator’s creaturely form and movement: transparent but hairy paws, hooks that drip with venom, and an ability to squeeze under doors and between books. This narrator is lying in wait for Nana, the tenant, and also for her young lover, Vali, an aspiring writer. Through the night, Nana and Vali tell each other stories. It is Nana who is the master spinner, a Scheherazade keeping the danger of the ominous narrator at bay. Her tale is a transportive one. As Vali observes, “Your voice replaces the objects in the room that had been so present to us till now and from which only the ashes remain.”
“REM” continues to move through vivid, surreal scenes, in which Nana and those around her experience terror and amazement. What suffuses “REM” are Nana’s intelligent, detailed descriptions and an attitude that―in the way of children, or adolescents, or maybe just people―oscillates between the tender and the savage. She emerges as a figure able to locate some of her own agency even in the midst of a bleak, broken life largely outside of her control. For those living under the strictures of repression, Nana, I believe, would be a recognizable character.
Surrounding “REM” are four other stories. The short stories of Cărtărescu’s prologue and epilogue, “The Roulette Player” and “The Architect,” act as excellent introduction and conclusion to the book, establishing and summarizing other ideas that course throughout Nostalgia: chance and fate, grotesquery and beauty, and cosmic creation. Near the end of that first story, the narrator of “The Roulette Player” reflects, metanarratively, “But there is a place in the world where the impossible is possible, namely in fiction...”
In a fourth story, “Mentardy,” a group of neighborhood children fall under the spell of a charismatic boy who tells them entrancing, frightening stories and richly imagined theories of the nature of the universe. Here, it is sexual differentiation that creates a kind of terror for the awed narrator. “The Twins,” the book’s fifth story, follows the exhausting vicissitudes of teenage love. The affair culminates in erotic fulfillment, disturbing awakenings at a natural history museum, and a mysterious reversal of identities.
Julian Semilian’s capable translation of Cărtărescu’s stories creates a fitting tone and energy for an English reader of Nostalgia. As the sun sets near the beginning of “The Twins,” for example, we get this sentence: “The room itself, like a cubical and illusory parasite, sucks the bloody outside into the wide stripes on the walls.” (63) In Semilian’s translation, the room itself has become a visceral, preying beast without losing its status as architecture. Other passages are more subtle. In “Mentardy,” Semilian uses the word “endless” to describe a tall woman, suggesting, with that single adjective, the world from a child’s low perspective. (38) In another section in the story, the narrator tells how, “…pale images suddenly erupt on my brain’s silver…” The color suggests both the mind’s grey matter but also the eruption of images that is the silver screen of cinema. Again, Semilian is suggesting so much with his smart diction.
My copy of Nostalgia, printed as a New Directions Paperbook Original, is set with dense type. Cărtărescu, what’s more, writes long paragraphs and often sentences. Don’t let these aesthetics deter you. Throughout these stories, there are scenes and circumstances that reflect the grim realities of Cărtărescu’s world, a world, perhaps, that’s increasingly familiar or at least once more probable. But the book also contains moments of ecstasy and cosmic awe that push past realism. Cărtărescu, I believe is, in part, urging us to let imagination take hold. As he writes in the voice of one of his characters, “You know how to listen…But it all depends on if you know how to dream.”
