Alexandru Condrache’s book scans nostalgy’s landscapes with gusto aplenty and no little faith. He knows what he’s talking about even if some of us don’t care, while others might try to not remember the scars that once were wounds, some deep. As a devoted interdisciplinarian, he chronicles the kinds and binds of (mostly Eastern European) nostalgies stalking literature and film, journalism and ads, ideologies left and right, and our less or more fictitious selves. Ostalgie, Yugonostalgia, and especially Romanian post-communist aches are taken to task, sifted through fine meshed analytic strainers, found wanting or desirous, and placed in inviting synthetic containers where nostalgias cohabitate, whether personal or collective, painful or just playful, ridiculous, dramatic, or passées. (...)

Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe: From Literature and Film to Media sets up and charts off one of the most inclusive networks of nostalgias to date. At that, it is to be reckoned with as a lucid study in interdisciplinary communication, and as an open and open-ended alleviation of disciplinarian nostalgy, the spirit’s aching.

Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu