Web of Existence

Atrial Web of Existence Christian Moraru Nostalgia Mircea Cärtärescu Translated by Julian Semilian Introduction by Andrei Codrescu New Directions http://www.ndpublishing.com 335 pages; paper, $19.95 Kundera, Pavic, Esterházy, Ki§, Brodsky: they are, as Philip Roth has called them, writers from "the other Europe." Following as they are in the footsteps of the great generation of Kafka and Nabokov, then Bulgakov and Pasternak, they nonetheless continue to be quarantined—with the possible exception of somebody like Kundera—on the foggy fringes ofour postwar European canon. Both inside and outside the academy, an old-style, Cold-War sort ofcartography still holds sway, skewing our representation of contemporary Europe in literature no less than (some say) in foreign policy. By and large, we have cast aside this (un)critical approach ofbroad brushstrokes and hard-and-fast binaries in other, formerly colonial zones; here, though, things appear to be changing at a slower pace. While some Central and East European writers have been making inroads, we still perceive them—when we notice them at all—as a fairly undifferentiated bunch, lumping them together as Europe's (and our) "others," "out there," hopelessly sealed in their sectarian traditions and squabbles, in languages, styles, and frames ofreference that bear a prevailingly local, idiomatic relevance. Little wonder that Pavic, Kis, Havel, Milosz, and their likes have been writing vigorously against this misperception, foregrounding a strong if culturally qualified sense of European belonging, ofparticipation in traditions cutting across "Old Europe's" national and political boundaries, to offer us an emphatically cosmopolitan mindset, and a special sensitivity to trans-local, global processes, to the "big picture" of Europe and beyond. Romanian novelist, poet, and essayist Mircea Cärtärescu joins in this unorchestrated yet culturally and politically defining effort. Recently released by New Directions, the English translation of his most important novel so far, Nostalgia, may strike some as a call from Roth's "other Europe," from an idiomatic geography hard to relate to. Yet the themes and, equally important, the rustle of cultural echoes that the discerning ear will make out in this call tie Cärtärescu's style and vision into styles and visions that have long since become "mainstream," and now speak to us with authority: Kafka and Borges, Marquez and Cortázar; the kabbalah and the German romantics; the more recent, postmodern masters no less than the popular culture of the seventies and eighties on both sides of the Atlantic. In all likelihood, the devotee of "The Metamorphosis" (1915), Ficciones (1956), V. (1961), or Beat poetry will recognize here not only a sophisticated literary cosmopolitanism—a system of references, alliances, and allusions that comprise a sustained intertextual engagement with the modern classics of Europe and the Americas—but also the quality of such a conversation, the superb force of an essentially postmodern style and a post-Whitmanian "visionarism" that deliberately and innovatively play on other styles and visions to carve out their own uniqueness. Coming from Europe's ever-convulsive, shifty margins, Cärtärescu rose to fame in Romania during communism's last years, and against their state-run grotesque.Those wereyearsoffurther, self-destructive marginalization of a regime intent upon making the country into an "other" within Europe's "designated" hinterland beyond the Iron Curtain—that is to say, into an exception to the perestroïka already shaking up the communist bloc. On its last legs, moribund dictatorship was an eerily baroque time of collective despair, cynicism, andUtopian dissent, withparty-line socialistnationalism worsening the country's isolation. Yet this seclusion was far more political than cultural. Alongside other members of the so-called "generation of the eighties," Cärtärescu wrote then, and is writing these days, conspicuously against isolation, parochialism, and their associated disastrous politics. In book after book, he has developed a staggeringly holistic vision, a sweeping, hyperbolic panorama integrating the authorial ego and place ofauthorship into broader locales, worlds, and ontologies. Again, this juxtapositional, "synthetic" pathos has been political all along. Nostalgia speaks eloquently to this radically non-sectarian mindset by turning its back to what the official Romanian propaganda of the eighties and its post-communist heirs identify as the "representative," "organic" tradition...