Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Julian Semilian (New Directions/Penguin)

I first read Mircea Cărtărescu's wondrous novel, ''Nostalgia' back in 2012, seven years after it had been published in translation by New Directions and nineteen years after the complete version was published in Romania. Having read it, I wrote a piece for Goodreads that was, I think, more of a reaction - an attempt to capture the impact the novel had had on me - than a review. Because those thoughts give a very immediate impression of the novel (in a fashion which will probably make more sense to anyone who has read the novel than to those who haven't), I've decided to mark the occasion of the publication of the book by Penguin in their Modern Classics imprint by stealing my short 'review' from Goodreads and posting it here, without changes.

There is a place in the world where the impossible is possible, namely fiction, that is, literature.

Mircea Cărtărescu.

Thus, in this world, we meet the Russian roulette player who will not die, not only because he can always confound the odds, but because we the readers bring him to life every time we read about his deeds. Again and again, we can bring our particular version of this man and all the other characters of this novel (if it is a novel) into a contingent existence. Concentrate. We're giving life to someone.

It was impossible for him to exist, still he existed.

Eternal characters: they never die because they never lived.

We children, clamber and explore; over the walls and down into basements, exploring every possible hidden and forbidden space; the physical and the mental. A remarkable boy enraptures the children with tales of remarkable deeds.

We felt as though we were in the temple of a powerful and incomprehensible deity.

Into this mythic world the confusing, troubling world of adults leaks. The impulses of the future begin to assert themselves. Time pushes unceasingly against any wish to remain unchanged. We change, despite ourselves. In Cărtărescu's telling, we can change completely, not just through age or experience, but we can become another gender, another person. Girls play games in which they cross lines that bring them through the decades of their lives until the moment of their deaths, visible to others, untold to them when they reappear as the girls they really are at that moment of their lives. A moment is already gone forever. In this world male and female, day and night, young and old mutate and are transformed. A man's obsession can bring him from the driver's seat of his Dacia car to the controlling force of the universe and then the progenitor of a whole new universe. Julian Semilian, whose fluid, exuberant translation I read says that Cărtărescu "has written of the three brains underneath the human skull: the reptilian, the mammalian, the human. To those he adds speculation about a fourth brain, wondering about an archetypical Bucharest, the Hieropolis of an angel's brain. This Bucharest is the rich city where 'Nostalgia' unfolds."

This is a remarkable novel, one of the best I have ever read. Every dream and transformation is given the convincing context we need to believe in the most impossible possibilities. It's fiction, every word of it is true.