It’s all rather grimy, dirty and fantastic, with the man at the centre of it all someone who could have crawled out of a Dostoyevsky story: There’s something very Russian, too, about the story itself. This pastime is strictly of the Russian variety… The writer skilfully portrays a clandestine Bucharest underworld, where shady characters fill dark basements in search of thrills – oh, and even if the story is based around roulette, there are no wheels to be found here.
We begin with ‘The Roulette Player’, a superb short story in which an ageing writer revisits a piece he wrote early in his career, based, he says, on his own experiences. Nostalgia is made up of two short texts, forming a prologue and an epilogue, sandwiching three main pieces, each of these a novella in its own right, and the main theme connecting the stories is that of memory, and looking back at a distant past. It’s also certainly not a book to rush through – these are stories that reward those willing to take the time to immerse themselves in Cărtărescu’s slightly bizarre world. Nostalgia (translated by Julian Semilian, review copy courtesy of Penguin Classics) was published in the US by New Directions a fair while back, but it’s taken its time to cross the Atlantic – about sixteen years to be precise… Nevertheless, it’s a book that’s worth the wait, and even if its billing as a novel might be stretching the truth a little, it’s an intriguing, absorbing work comprising five separate pieces connected by the themes of youth, nostalgia and storytelling. Another of the writer’s works is being released today for the first time in the UK. And, while we wait for that one to appear, I have more welcome news.
Deep Vellum will at some point be bringing out Cărtărescu’s epic novel Solenoid (once Cotter has struggled through some 900 pages of translation!).
Sadly, the rest of the trilogy never made it into English, but for those wanting to try more of his work, there is hope in sight. Back in 2013, I was blown away by Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu’s novel Blinding (translated by Sean Cotter), the first part in an ambitious trilogy exploring the author’s life and family while taking a distinctly surrealist look at his country and society.
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