Name: Nostalgia
SKU: 1760320
Price: 974.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Cartarescu, Mircea ; Semilian, Julian ; Codrescu, Andrei
ISBN: 9780811215886

Type

Physical Book

Author

Introduction by

Translated by

Publisher

Year

2005

Language

English

Pages

361

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22x15 cm

Weight

ISBN

0811215881

ISBN13

9780811215886

Synopsis "Nostalgia "

The astonishing debut in English of one of Romania's foremost writers.

Mircea Cartarescu, born in 1956, is one of Romania's leading novelists and poets. This translation of his 1989 novel Nostalgia, writes Andrei Codrescu, "introduces to English a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few." Like most of his literary contemporaries of the avant-garde Eighties Generation, his major work has been translated into several European languages, with the notable exception, until now, of English.

Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. Although each of its five chapters is separate and 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.

Mircea Cartarescu

(Author)

View Author's Page

Mircea Cartarescu was born on June 1, 1956 in Bucharest, Romania into a middle-class family. From an early age, he showed a strong interest in literature and music, influenced by the counterculture of the 60s and 70s. He pursued his studies at the University of Bucharest, in the faculty of letters where he earned a PhD with a fascinating thesis on Romanian postmodernism. He has been a university professor, editor, and contributor to literary magazines, as well as an active member of the Romanian PEN Club and the European Cultural Parliament.

He began his literary career as a poet in 1978 and published his first book, Faurir, vitrin, fotografii (1980), which earned him the Romanian Writers' Union Award. His work is characterized by lyrical, dreamlike, and experimental prose, in which the boundary between reality and dream blurs. He has explored themes such as memory, identity, recent Romanian history, and the transformative power of literature.

He was awarded the prestigious Formentor Prize for Literature, and has received awards of the importance of the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages. His texts have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

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