Joyful air guitar is not always expected from the European avantgarde, but here is Romanian powerhouse Mircea Cartarescu describing a schooldays rendition of “Sgt. Pepper’s” in his major debut in English, “Nostalgia” (New Directions, 352 pages, $19.95):

Some straddled their legs as far as they could, bent their knees, leaned backward … emitting strange sounds with their mouths, in imitation of the guitar’s wah-wah. Others beat on their desks with a deafening rhythm … they all knew the words they were singing, entire records by heart, note by note.

Typical Soviet-bloc romanticism, perhaps, exaggerated in due absurdist fashion, but Mr. Cartarescu is in every way done justice by this adolescent scene. If Milan Kundera is Eastern Europe’s dirty old man, Mr. Cartarescu plays the nerd asking the same old metaphysical questions, but in a spiky new way.

Consequently, Mr. Cartarescu is readable. His plastic-age images make for memorable vistas in what would otherwise be another forgettable, if vertiginous, trek up Mount Magical Realism. Like Borges, Mr. Cartarescu envisions worlds within worlds, but unlike Borges, his infinities have a synthetic worldliness, a kind of 1980s gemutlichkeit. His recollection of his last visit to a girlfriend’s bedroom is positively New Wave: “It was as if all of my presences in this room, from autumn till now, were superimposed over each other in successive layers of thick, polychrome lacquer.”

“Nostalgia,” originally published in 1989, comprises two novellas and several related stories united by an explicitly Rilkean excitability about nostalgia – the narrator of “Mentardy” speaks of the “unbearable nostalgia” elicited by a violet-pink cigarette lighter. In “The Twins,” the narrator is driven to attempt cross-dressing and suicide simultaneously, so blighted is he by memories of his high school girlfriend (the Smiths are an ironic, subterranean presence throughout these pages).

“The Architect” concerns a compulsive organist who spontaneously plays forgotten Pythagorean scales on his electronic keyboard, eventually recapitulating the canon of Western keyboard music and taking over the world; it’s as if remembering an old song meant a little nostalgic death, or, on this story’s terms, apocalypse. The or ganist mutates, in sympathy to his exponential power, giving Mr. Cartarescu a chance to deploy his virtuosic flair for the repulsive:

His head had joined his torso, his features, like finely traced lines, could barely be spotted on his fleshy face. … His elbows and his upper arms had been reabsorbed into his ribs, so that two bouquets of fingers issued directly out of his torso, each comprising an assemblage of complexly articulated twiglike filaments.

Not many contemporary writers pursue this effect. Mr. Cartarescu’s imagination exceeds prevailing Western tastes: “I dream enormously, in demented colors,” he begins one story, as if corroborating Andrei Codrescu’s preface, which pits Mr. Cartarescu against “tight-ass minimalism.” But there are several rabbit-hole passages that will dismay even Mr. Codrescu’s most willing converts.

Too often, the narrator resorts to Poelike self-questioning: “What do these pages, spread out over the sheets and the night table, contain?” Another narrator explains, “I am, as you well know, an occasional writer of pose.” Such selfconsciousness is little more than a lame plot device.

But Mr. Cartarescu always saves himself, in Julian Semilian’s translation, with a brilliant, up-to-date image, as when the organist, having taken over the world, begins to play the music of the spheres: “the Sun exploded, hurling into space volatile,etherlike matter in the form of purple and violet flames, scintillating in millions of fringes.” If George Lucas were a poet, this is how he would write. It is not just the vividness of Mr. Cartarescu’s imagination, but its careening disposition that makes it, in its otherwise crepuscular avant-gardism, more modern than much of what is translated into English from Europe.

***

Joanna Scott writes historical fiction from distinctly original angles – in “Arrogance,” for example, she decided to occupy the mind of none other than Egon Schiele. In her new novel, “Liberation” (Little, Brown, 262 pages, $23.95), Ms. Scott finds a new way to tell the story of World War II, examining the invasion of Elba, Napoleon’s old retreat, by Senegalese soldiers. But, like several of Ms. Scott’s books, the spark of “Liberation” comes not from combinatorial zest, but from the child narrator.

“How does God reward courage?” asks 10-year-old Adriana Nardi, who has just emerged from a night spent in the cupboard, hiding out in case leering soldiers show up at her parents’ farm. Adriana wants to go outside, to investigate the progress of the war, where she has the opportunity to ask mouths-of-babes questions. She “knew not to be surprised by what she didn’t understand,” and she serves Ms. Scott’s purpose with aplomb. The narrative carries forward to Adriana’s existence, at age 70, on the New Jersey Transit, where Ms. Scott indulges in a stream of consciousness that suffers badly in comparison with the perfected speech of her younger narrator. A quiet novel, “Liberation” is notable, but not a landmark in the current crop of war fiction.

blytal@nysun.com