Nostalgia, by Mircea Cărtărescu
Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian writer of a thoroughly surrealist bent, and his stories are nonlinear, packed with hallucination and impossibilities. In Romania, he is primarily known as a poet, despite the fact that he has apparently not written a line of verse in several decades. His fiction has become his poetry, then, and he thinks in terms of symbolic resonances rather than linear events. This could make for difficult reading (and sometimes does), but Cărtărescu also has an uncanny capacity to be entertaining without sacrificing poetic vision or literary depth. At least, such is the case with his novel Nostalgia, translated into English by Julian Semilian. The book is a collection of five strange and loosely interrelated parts, each taking place in Bucharest as it exists in the imagination of the author. The first and last of these parts form a frame around the stories at the center.
The first of these parts tells the story of a deranged roulette game in which sponsors recruit “players” for one-man Russian roulette, where the audience bets against the sponsor that the player will die. One such player, however, becomes something of a wizard at the game and develops a cult following by increasing the stakes in an insane spectacle of fate that expands to reach biblical proportions.
We are then introduced in the next part to a group of young boys playing together behind an apartment block in what is probably my favorite portion of the whole book. The kids are lively, occasionally violent. Among their other activities, they play a version of tag called “witchbitch,” wherein one child dons a primitive cardboard mask and, a small stick in hand, chases down the others, whips them, and carries them away into the “cave” under a stairwell, thus converting the captured into yet another witchbitch. Such is the state of the children—that is, until the arrival of a character who is referred to only as “Mentardy” (a nickname combining “mental” and “retard”). Mentardy is no simpleton, however, but something of a child messiah. He gains the boys’ respect through a daring feat of courage and by reciting long stories, ultimately converting the other children to a list of commandments, including prohibitions on violence and witchbitch. The children’s period of grace comes to end after Mentardy begins to display interest in the opposite sex beyond what the other boys find acceptable, and he finally disappears from their lives altogether.
The third part of Nostalgia was for me the least interesting, though it was hardly boring. It follows the romantic awakenings of a young man, which culminate in his love for a fickle and shallow girl named Gina, by whom he is entirely dominated. The story is one of the darker portions of the novel, and it is filled with nightmare-inflected imagery of evolutionary processes, animals, insects, fetuses, and so on. The main theme here is arguably sexual domination or obsession to the point where self and other merge. The praying mantis, the female half of which proverbially eats the male, as well as the nets of female spiders (explicitly compared to women by the narrator) abound through the story, though the twist at the ending complicates any simplistic conclusions.
“REM,” part 4 of Nostalgia, mirrors in many respects part 3: We are again introduced, through many fascinating convolutions of narration, to a group of children, but this time they are all girls. The narrator learns of the presence of a mysterious entity called REM that exists in a shed near the house where she is staying with her aunt. The gigantic caretaker of REM (the exact nature of which is never precisely revealed) believes the narrator to be special, to have been chosen in some way to finally access REM, and gives her a small shell to place under her pillow so that she might dream her way there. Meanwhile, the narrator and the group of girls who live nearby begin playing a game of “queens,” in which each girl is assigned a color, an object, a flower, and so on and made to hold court for one day out of the week. This game takes on surreal dimensions when they find that their chosen objects grant them quasi-magical powers, such as the ability to see into the future, and each day becomes a fairy-tale exploration of these various abilities. We learn that the game of queens is related to the narrator’s dreams, moreover, and the two begin to intersect until we are given a strange vision that reveals, to some extent, what REM is—and its relationship to the alchemy of writing.
The novel’s epilogue, “The Architect,” is a tour-de-force of unsettling, sci-fi adjacent surrealism in which a man becomes obsessed with the expressive capacities of his beloved car’s horn. His monomania leads him to install an electric organ in the place of the steering wheel so as to improve the vehicle’s expressive capacities, and he quickly begins to recapitulate the entire history of Western music sitting alone in his car. Things only get stranger from there, however, to the point that the whole globe, and ultimately the whole universe becomes enmeshed in the actions of this musician. The ending finds Nostalgia’s scope blown open to include the life and death of galaxies, the end and beginning of time and space themselves.
It is difficult to determine how the various parts of Cărtărescu’s novel are meant to stand together. Certainly it all takes place in a mythical version of Bucharest, and characters from one story sometimes appear briefly in others, but it is hard to find themes that run clearly through the whole. Nevertheless, Cărtărescu himself has declared that the novel does contain unity: “The stories connect subterraneously, caught in the web of the same magical and symbolist thought. . . . This is a fractalic and holographic novel, in which each part reflects the others.”
The central three chapters do display common themes. They are all, in various ways, concerned with the world of childhood—with all its mysteries, magic, and even darkness—and with the loss of that world in the growth of sexuality. Images of onto- and phylogenesis abound, as do images of birth. If “Mentardy” is primarily concerned with childhood as seen from the male perspective, “REM” deals with the female perspective, and one of the primary functions of the girl’s game is to contemplate the mysteries of pregnancy and birth, which they are all poised to someday experience, at least potentially. In the middle stands “Twins,” the title of which is a reference to its male and female characters, a story about romantic relationship, its dangers and its totalizing potential. “REM” further connects to themes of creation, of which birth is itself a form, and Cărtărescu has claimed the story is primarily about “the nostalgic search for the Creator,” though it is difficult to see this as a theme clearly reflected in the other stories.
But how to place Nostalgia’s epilogue and prologue within this structure? “The Roulette Player” seems primarily about the absurdities of fate and luck, the strange currents that underly and guide individual lives in unexpected and frequently ironic ways. “The Architect,” on the other hand, might be read as a Kafkaesque meditation on the power of artistic creation. Perhaps one could say that both look to the inhuman powers that structure the world of experience (music in “The Architect” is hardly a positive, purely artistic force, after all) and that these forces act as a frame for the stories concerned with life and birth just as such forces in reality frame those central dramas of human and biological existence.
Or perhaps we might find unity in the theme of a “search for the Creator” after all, and especially the characters’ search for/relationship with the author. “The Roulette Player” thus examines the absurdity of a character testing fate, testing the position the author has placed him in. “Mentardy” enacts a kind of incarnation, in which the author as storyteller comes into the world to affect the lives of the characters, only to be consumed by it. “The Twins” is harder to place, but one might see in it the mystery of the identity of author and creation, as the story revolves around romantic love as a locus of sharing perspectives to the point of total identification. “REM” and “The Architect” then fit cleanly within the scheme. The former’s focus on birth reflects the search for REM, the mind dreaming the world, while the latter is concerned with the artist as the creator of the universe, which, in fiction, is literally true.
Maybe I’m onto something with these speculations, maybe not. Either way, it isn’t necessary to find a coherent structure to the book as a whole to be able to enjoy it, and enjoy it I most certainly did. While I was less thrilled with certain sections of the book than others, those parts I did like (especially “Mentardy” and “REM”) stood out to me as some of the most unique and brilliant writing I have perhaps ever encountered. Cărtărescu has said in interviews that all his books are written as exercises in following his own imagination wherever it leads; I take this to mean that his work is a result of intentional dreaming, and reading Nostalgia felt like entering a dream, one that is at once disturbing and dazzlingly beautiful and rich.
