Books by Mircea Cărtărescu (born in 1956 in Bucharest) offer a solid proof that the human species is still evolving, and the boom of Romanian cinema and literature – as connoisseurs would agree – is no coincidence nor a sudden burst of creativity following the fall of the dark communist regime. For it seems that Romania can boast with once fantastic theatre, their intelligentsia is internationally recognized with some of its members heavily influencing the European spiritual landscaped for more than 70 years now, such as Ionescu, Eliade, or Cioran, to name just a few. However, there is more of them, perhaps even more significant ones, such as the so far undiscovered philosopher Constantin Noica, for whom Cioran says: "I am admired in the West. In my Romania, there lives a philosopher ten times more important than me, and he is unknown".

Noica deserves our attention, moreover it is advisable to lead inner dialogues with such authors. In the book Romanian Existentialism and European Metaphysics, published by Filip Višnjić in Serbia, Eugen Simion presents Noica's philosophical work and his life, spent mainly in prisons and exile, both inner and literal ones. He waged a battle of thought against the totalitarian regime in his country, but he also challenged the West, which, in his opinion, was dedicated to skimming off the "cream", whereas he fought for the sake of the culture. And the strategy he used in his struggle included some paradoxical moves, such as the question he asked a student as he entered the classroom for the first and last time in the last 40 years of his life: What did you learn from your teacher Nae Ionescu? The question was problematic on several levels; Ionescu supported the extreme right-wing movement, and his name was to be avoided in the communist regime. The answer was even more problematic: He taught me how to recover from philosophy.

Noica is one of the rare authors, along with Cărtărescu, who believed that the only hope for this planet lay in humans, in the existence of their brains. Cărtărescu claims that the human brain is the only true divine thing – Noica would probably agree instantly – and this is contrary to today's popular critique of human actions, from the intellectual to techno-climate ones. Whatever happens, there is hope about and in humans, no matter how amorphous it may be. There is another aspect that connects the two authors: Noica's style is particularly belletristic, whereas Cărtărescu, even at the peak of his immagination, leaves an impression of an author who has thought everything through. Cărtărescu entered the literary scene as a poet, and in the 1980s he worked on the manuscript of Nostalgia, but when it was time to publish it nobody wanted to do it, keeping it in the drawers for four years and finally, publishing a version devastatingly truncated by Romanian censors. They also changed its title into Dreams to avoid the identical title of the movie by Tarkovsky, the director who had defected from USSR. Cărtărescu’s fellow-countrymen editors, as is often the case, had no clue whatsoever what they were holding in their hands and failed to realise that this was one of those rare books that was also a literary testimony about, as mentioned before, the further evolution of the human species; about the fact that humans, even if it only meant individuals as himself, could still be trusted. But who cares about that when all they have ever cared about is control?

Cărtărescu currently works as a professor at Bucharest University. Even though he started his writing career as a poet, in the experience-woven Nostalgia, he reflects negatively on his poetry and perhaps most of the poetry, saying that he dislikes the elements that weave poetry because they remind him too much of ether or nail polish. He writes essays and literary criticism, and his reading list includes Ihab Hassan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Vladimir Nabokov, Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, David Lodge, Michel Tournier, Jose Saramago, and perhaps the most important of all – Julio Cortázar, whose Hopscotch may be compared in strength with Nostalgia. Some of his books of poetry are Songs of Love (1982), The Levant (1990), 50 Sonnets (2003) and his most famous prose works are Nostalgia (1993), trilogy Blinding (1996 – 2002), Why We Love Women (2004), Beautiful Strangers (2010), Solenoid (2015), Melancholy (2019). His essays have been published in the books Romanian Postmodernism (1999), Forever Young, Wrapped in Pixels (2003), You, Baron! (2005). Ignored at his beginnings, he has received many awards in the meantime which, for the lack of space, will not be listed here. We can surely count on more. Rare are the authors that are on a par with Cărtărescu when it comes to embodying the true essence of writing, and his lack of publicity is most likely a consequence of his exceptionality.

Remarkable books, as any dedicated reader would know, elude almost all interpretative points, but I will try to indicate some at least. The novel or the loose collection of stories Nostalgia, just like Cortázar's Hopscotch, is an autobiography, author's poetics, fiction and prose poetry, a documentary recording of life and its imaginary portrait. At the very beginning, Cărtărescu marks the paths he will take. Nostalgia consists of five parts, five separate stories: The Roulette Player, Mentardy, The Twins, REM¸and The Architect. They occur in Bucharest, often called 'the Paris of East'. The author, similarly to Bruno Schulz, manages to reconstruct the past and childhood with an almost mythical ability to feel, perceive and have those first thoughts, the ones still unimpaired by the formality of education, which is quite often simply a way to sort out the impression boxes according to the wishful and expected order of the epoch spirit. The Roulette Player is the story of a man who plays Russian roulette and puts more and more bullets into his gun, starting with one and ending with all six; but with the last bullet, an earthquake strikes, and he ends up not dying after all. The critics believe that this story is Cărtărescu's way of invoking and challenging the spirit of Franz Kafka, introducing at the same time the readers to the magical world they would enter after this programmatic overture. The roulette player eventually gets killed by a street criminal, just like many do here in the Balkans, no matter how lucky they get in this tough game. Cărtărescu's stories emerge from the heart of the world whose logic knows no luck, just the wide-open jaws of chaos. The next chapter (or story, depending on how you preceive the text) deals with a descent into the abyss of childhood, childhood seen as a kingdom. There is a new boy in the neighbourhood: enchanting, utterly different from others, the literary cousin of Fournier's Meaulnes or Miller's Roy Hamilton, the magical being who knows all the answers at a very young age, all the different answers, not the same ones; and in his world questions belong to the past, such distant past that they cannot be tested anymore. This sort of understanding requires more than faith; it requires experience that reminds of Jung: “Do you believe in God?”, they asked him, “I don’t believe”, he answere, “I know”. Arrogant, but only if you lack the experience, the encounter, the moment in life when a new door opens, when life begins, or the second birth, called Dvija or twice-born in the East. Once the magic kicks in, this world gets wrapped around the host’s head like an aura, it’s that kind of a world. Cărtărescu says: "I have realized that this period of my life was a period that concentrated all that is primal in me." There is no mystification here: we find ourselves in such a situation every time we talk to a person whose point of view comes from a place we have never considered. Mentardy, this new boy, was such a viewpoint. The author says: only the description of the land of happy people from Plato's Phaedo measures up to this. There are other intellectual imaginations similar to Plato's in Nostalgia. For example, the Earth is described as an animal with a mind and will much greater than ours; also, there are four types of people – those who have not been born, those who live, those who have died and those who are neither living, nor born, nor dead. Then: after your death, you take off on a long journey that constantly ascends. The name Mentardy is translated from the Romanian Mendebilul, a coin-word of mental and retarded, which is a sharp, lucid critique of the notion of holiness around which European religious identity was built. Typically, the boy gets hurt by his peers. And then, after he betrays them, the narrator feels something approaching and smells the poisonous ice that sends a cold shudder into every pore on his skin. For this, one needs to be sentient. In The Twins, there is a love story that results in the alchemistic unification of two lovers into one being, and in REM, the hero of The Twins appears and provides us with the retrospection of this experience. Bucharest is omnipresent – the city which grows thousands of meters underground, where characters sink with their fantasies enhanced by the fantasies of the narrator, the writer in the making, the poet who gives up poetry, who sees this type of expression as not able to catch the spirit of these times because the evil spirit of the epoch continuously floats over its extraordinary individuals. The moral reiterated at the end of the novel might be compared to Bob Dylan's claim that now when he has finally become young, he plans to stay young for the rest of his life. Cărtărescu, contrary to accustomed beliefs, considers the return to childhood and its underlying states as paramount. Back then, playing did not have a name or surname; it was just play, not burdened with identity or biography. The last chapter, The Architect, deals with this topic. A guy buys a Dacia 1300, takes off the tyres, installs a keyboard onto the control board and starts playing different melodies: here, Cărtărescu offers a concise review of exceptional music taste. When discussing music, it is noteworthy that in earlier chapters, he distances himself from the prevailing rock herd taste of the generation, as if he were compelled to synchronize with that music (if it could indeed be called music) purely due to social reasons. The music of his youth was not his music, and the non-conformist story of rock seemed to be just another conformist episode in the succession of human capitulations. However, the last chapter deals with the opposite idea; it tells a story about an architect who, despite everyone, is searching for the Orphic-Pythagorean scales in the non-functional car. It is a caricature of what happened to European culture. This is the time to remember Noica's cream that Europe picked while smaller peripheral nations remained entrenched in an enduring struggle for basic survival.

Cărtărescu has authored several books as good as Nostalgia. Besides him, there are other exceptional Romanian authors, such as Vlad Zografi and Daniel Banulescu. Nostalgia is a phenomenal introduction to this magical literature.