European Book Club: Nostalgia, by Mircea Cărtărescu

Where: Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, 573-577 Third Avenue (at 38th Street), New York, NY

To register for this session, send us an email at romania.nyc@europeanbookclub.org

The Book:

Nostalgia, by Mircea Cărtărescu

Nostalgia “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. (…) Cărtărescu indulges in compassion and love for his former selves and is a childlike (that is to say fierce) defender of both memory and the freedom to dream.” – Andrei Codrescu

Although each of its five chapters 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. In one story, which involves a roulette player who survives against astonishing odds, the narrator 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.”

The Author:

Mircea Cărtărescu (b. 1956 in Bucharest) is one of Romania’s leading novelists, and is considered by many to be the most important Romanian author writing today. In Romania he has a popular following across older and younger generations, and although he is widely read in translation in Europe, only one of his novels has appeared in English to date – Nostalgia (originally published in Romanian in 1989).