The narrator of the first story in Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia makes a Behanesque association with medicine: “literature”, he says, “is teratology” (the study of abnormalities). He is a writer disillusioned with his own writing: “let me permit myself now … one moment of lucidity: everything I wrote after the age of thirty was no more than painful imposture,” and puts at least some of his loss of ability down to the time when he was very happy, because “writing does not reconcile itself with happiness and plenty.” He is old, lonely, facing the remainder of his life with a sort of dull, nihilistic despair, convinced that his remaining reader “is no-one else but death.”

Nostalgia was originally published in Cărtărescu’s native Romania in 1989, and though this was in the waning days of Ceauşescu’s rule, the book was heavily censored. An uncensored version was published in 1993, and an English translation appeared in 2005. It is described as a novel but each of the sections reads as a separate work, related to the others predominantly through the depiction of a harsh and decadent Bucharest. ’The Roulette Player’ resonates with The Master and Margarita. It does not have the explicit unreality of Bulgakov’s work, but there is the same disconcerting familiarity with extremes of repression or deprivation, the same sense of urgent pursuit—of understanding with Bulgakov, and meaning with Cărtărescu—and the same unspooling of the everyday world.

After years of inventing characters, Cărtărescu’s narrator writes finally of one whom he describes as improbable but as nonetheless having really existed. The man in question was almost destitute when he came out of prison, and when the narrator sees him again years later, “still displaying the vagabond appearance” but clearly in materially far more comfortable circumstances. Through this renewed contact, the narrator begins “to sense the terror of beginning to discern … some vistas which disappeared toward a great space other than the bourgeois world”, and he eventually encounters, blindfolded and “dragged long some twisted and tortuous corridors”, high-stakes, illegal, and ritualistic performances of Russian roulette.

This pursuit of death in which his friend (now the eponymous Roulette Player) participates becomes perversely very profitable, and the performances take place in more open and opulent surroundings. The ‘game’ takes on an almost hieratic aspect: not only did the Roulette Player hold “the Angels by the lapels”, the game achieves a “theological grandeur”, and the sounds (of the gun’s hammer, of a falling body) “were surrounded by a sacred silence”.

The story does ring an off-note with the women who are present in the roulette audience (all the players are men). While images of ‘bloodied gowns’ adds to the tension between aesthetic elegance and actual brutality, there is also a reek of the sexism, sometimes really appalling, present throughout Nostalgia.  That aside, the story is remarkably textured, vivid and grim, and unhesitating about extremes of each. The world of roulette it depicts is very niche but the themes it reflects upon are almost limitless: literature, chance, God. The narrator equates the Player with ultimate meaning. If the Player exists, the world exists, and the narrator will “march forth for as long as eternity lasts”.

First published in Romanian in Visul, Cartea Româneasca, 1989, and in English as part of Nostalgia, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005