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A Danubian Narnia: Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu, reviewed

5 June 2021

9:00 AM

5 June 2021

9:00 AM

Nostalgia Mircea Cartarescu, translated by Julian Semilian

Penguin Modern Classics, pp.352, 9.99

Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not the pared-down parables and ironies of his self-exiled compatriot (and Nobel laureate) Herta Müller, but a rainbow-hued riot of fantasy, imagination and invention. The gender-switching narrator of ‘The Twins’ — one of five linked tales that make up Nostalgia — urges his lover to remember that ‘under the obscene rococo of our world and flesh, our bones are gothic and our spirit is gothic’.

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