Cărtărescu’s fame has spiralled in recent years. The Twiterati are in a state of extreme excitement whenever his name crops up. Nostalgia is my first dive into his writing, and it’s clear that the author possesses what they always called back in my Writer’s Room days “a voice”. Nostalgia consists of five stories which are at most obliquely connected. The first deals with a Russian roulette player, who defies the odds. The last with an architect who creates the music of the spheres. Both these stories are breathlessly brilliant, in the way the writer’s imagination appears to stretch the boundaries, pushing the stories beyond any anticipated limits, in the process questioning the laws of probability and physics, respectively. These stories bookend three more which inhabit the middle of the book, and which this reader found heavier going. The intricacies of the writer’s mind at times seemed to overwhelm the scope of the story he was relating, or at least that was how it felt. The stories become ornately baroque and the quixotic Bucharest they occur in sometimes gets lost in the whorls and arpegios of the text. Or perhaps it was just the wrong week to be reading it.
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