Solo
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, Solo is a devastating and rapturous novel about the life and daydreams of Ulrich, a reclusive one-hundred-year-old man from Bulgaria
Before Ulrich lost his sight, he read a magazine story about parrots. A group of explorers had come upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by this discovery, the explorers put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.
Now one hundred years of age, Ulrich wonders if he, unlike these hapless birds, has any wisdom left to leave the world. He embarks on an epic armchair journey of remembrance and imagination—through the turbulent century that marked his country, Bulgaria, and through his own lifetime of lost love and thwarted ambitions.
Intertwining science and music, the Old World and the New, the real and the imagined, Solo is an outstanding novel by a remarkable fabulist, a writer of prodigious talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winner of the U.K.'s Commonwealth Prize, Dasgupta's second book (after Tokyo Canceled) is bold, enigmatic, and thought-provoking. After his pragmatic father crushes Ulrich's passion for music, he turns to chemistry, a subject that takes him to Berlin, "the capital of world science," during the ebb of the Ottoman Empire. He works alongside researchers on the forefront of discovery and shares the halls with Albert Einstein. But WWI forces him back home to Bulgaria and into a bookkeeping job at a chemical plant, where years of political upheavals leading to communism drive Ulrich into a private world of experimentation that ends decades later when he's blinded in an accident. Yet his mind remains very much alive, and the "second movement" of the book reveals a richly imagined world involving a Bulgarian musical prodigy, an American executive, and Georgian siblings whose lives all intersect in New York. With this ambitious structure, Dasgupta's subtle architecture gives rise to questions of modernity, memory, and human failures. Lucid prose and a narrative scheme both demanding and inchoate reveal a writer beginning to deploy his considerable powers.
