Solenoid
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
WINNER of the Dublin Literary Award 2024 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2022
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, Words Without Borders
A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding, Solenoid is an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths.
Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life, while on a broad scale Solenoid's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines attempt to reconcile the realms of life and art. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis preventorium, encounters with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. One character asks another: When you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork?
Combining fiction with autobiography and history—Nikola Tesla and Charles Hinton, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cartarescu (Blinding) weaves a monumental antinovel of metaphysical longing and fabulist constructions. The unnamed narrator has abandoned his youthful aspirations to become a writer, though he zealously maintains a diaristic "report of anomalies." He languishes in obscurity as an elementary school teacher in Bucharest, which he calls "a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things." Bookish and febrile, he lives in a boat-shaped house built atop one of the city's five "solenoids," torus-shaped metallic structures that tap into the energy of the fourth dimension, as well as providing earthly benefits such as the ability to levitate during sex. The novel shuttles among drily grotesque evocations of the narrator's life, his phantasmagoric dreams, and his obsessive search—along with a group of anti-death advocates called The Picketists—for a portal through which to escape the terrestrial plane. His search is aided, or frustrated, by baffling signs and visions proliferating across Bucharest, which the narrator struggles to decode and which produce fascinating digressions into the mystical origins of the Rubik's cube and an "incomprehensible, monstrous" medieval manuscript. Behind the narrator's torrential output is a deep Kafkaesque desire to solve an impossible puzzle. For the reader, it's more than a rewarding quest. This scabrous epic thrums with monstrous life.
