RCINY joins the European Book Club this year to present a session dedicated to Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia, published by New Directions in 2005.

This event marks the induction of Romanian literature in the European Book Club, a collaboration of NY-based European cultural institutions representing Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain. The Club meets monthly in a different cultural institute to discuss a well-known, contemporary novel of the respective country, thus offering readers an opportunity to feel the pulse of current European literary trends, and to gain access to contemporary literature upon which they might be otherwise unlikely to stumble. 

This summer, be sure to read or revisit Nostalgia, and join other readers of diverse backgrounds and professions to discuss this remarkably imaginative work.  

Mircea Cartarescu (b. 1956 in Bucharest) 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).

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." Andrei Codrescu writes that in Nostalgia, "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."