Mircea Cărtărescu’s first work of prose, Nostalgia, was for some reason published in English as a novel. But it is as much a novel as Joyce’s Dubliners is. Cărtărescu’s collection is similar to Joyce’s in that they both tell stories of people from young to old age, but that’s where the similarities stop. The Romanian writer concocts stories which are a stage of war between character, author and narrator and ‘Rem’ is the most intricate of all five stories in the volume. In this story we have three very different narrators, each with an apparently different goal in the act of storytelling. Nana tells her lover Vali about a summer from her childhood when she kissed someone for the first time. But the story surpasses this simple promise and encompasses the bizarre past of a family searching for “The Entrance,” Nana’s literal future on paper, and above all, the chance of a wasted life. The most charming section is Nana’s recollection of when she and her six friends play in that fated summer of childhood. To pass the time, the girls play a game called “The Queens”, where each girl gets to be Queen for a day. The Queen of the day has an object using which she’s supposed to invent a game and all other girls must play it. In the end, it turns out that it is be the game which plays the girls and the game is nothing short of a life lived. ‘Rem’ is a wonderful story of childhood, and the long shadow childhood throws upon our adult lives.
First published in English in Nostalgia, New Directions, 2005
A Personal Anthology 