Nostalgia

Cartarescu is, from my point of view, the most important Romanian prose writer alive. His prose is sweet and painful, structured and chaotic, erotic and anxious, subtle and funny. Many of his writings are filled with nostalgia, as he describes a Romania that does not exist anymore: the interbellic Romania or, in "Travesti", the spirit of the adolescent growing up in the communist Romania of the '60s and '70s.I met Mircea Cartarescu in 1986, while he was an instructor in what it was called at the time the "National Camp for Literary Creation". I was 14 years old and I was listening amazed to Mircea talking about solipsism, Borges and the "Theory of the Telescoped Worlds". At the time I (and many of those around me) had no clue who Mircea Cartarescu was, and even less who was he going to become.Only much later I realized how important in my intellectual and emotional (and -why not- sexual) development those Literary Camps were.Now, on January 13, 2007, I write these thoughts from my house in Berkeley, CA. After living for 7 years in the US, I became aware of the contrast between the depth and painful meaning of my Romanian communist adolescence, and the oblivious and meaningless life of the California adolescent. Both of them seem to me full of nostalgic hopelessness.I would encourage the American readers not to be "put off" by some of the Publisher Weekly comments that the book is too postmodern for the american reader who prefers "realist fiction". These are the type of comments that keep the American reader unaware that there are so many other styles of writing, which do not follow pre-established writing recipes. Real writers write because they cannot conceive their existence any other way, and not because they want to appeal to as many people as possible.

Need to re-read this soon...I love this book, truly a work that finds absolutely stunningly beautiful stories for us in some of the most bleak of settings (Bucharest tenements in the 1980s) - you can read each story on its own, but it's a wonderful experience to read it all the way through, which might be why the translation is billed as a "novel."A book that stays with you. Call it "magical realism" or "postmodernist" or whatever you want I suppose. At times it feels like a fictional surrealist memoir. It's probably best understood as gorgeous storytelling: phantasmal, oneiric, anxious, boring, horrifying. I recommend it highly.Semilian, as always, does a lovely job of translating. Codrescu's enthusiastic introduction, as always, is infectious.

hard to follow

Read and you`ll never be sorry!A fantastic writer!