Can a city made of memories and dreams be more real than the streets we walk on?

Nostalgia is Mircea Cărtărescu’s literary breakthrough, originally published in 1989 under the title The Dream to evade censorship. It is not merely a collection of stories but a unified novelistic structure consisting of five linked narratives. From the subterranean world of "The Roulette Player" to the gender-bending obsession in "The Twins," the book transforms Bucharest into a labyrinth of magical realism.

Cărtărescu explores the dark, feverish geography of childhood and adolescence. He blends the mundane—crumbling apartment blocks, dusty museums—with the fantastical, creating a universe where spiders, dreams, and ancient games hold cosmic significance.

Hailed as a masterpiece of European postmodernism, this book established Cărtărescu’s reputation as a visionary. It captures the intense, hallucinatory longing for a past that perhaps never existed, trapping the reader in a "nostalgia" that is as terrifying as it is beautiful.