Solénoïde

by Mircea Cărtărescu, Laure Hinckel (Translator)

Chef-d’œuvre de Mircea Cãrtãrescu, Solénoïde est un roman monumental où résonnent des échos de Borges, Swift et Kafka. Il s’agit du long journal halluciné d’un homme ayant renoncé à devenir écrivain, mais non à percer le mystère de l’existence.

Après avoir grandi dans la banlieue d’une ville communiste – Bucarest, qui est à ses yeux le « musée de la mélancolie et de la ruine de toute chose », mais aussi un organisme vivant, coloré, pulsatile –, il est devenu professeur de roumain dans une école de quartier. Si le métier le rebute, c’est pourtant dans cette école terrifiante qu’il fera trois rencontres capitales : celle d’Irina, dont il tombe amoureux, celle d’un mathématicien qui l’initie aux arcanes les plus singuliers de sa discipline, et celle d’une secte mystique, les piquetistes, qui organise des manifestations contre la mort dans les cimetières de la ville.

À ses yeux, chaque signe, chaque souvenir et chaque rêve est un élément du casse-tête dont la résolution lui fournira un « plan d’évasion », car il ne s’agit que de pouvoir échapper à la « conspiration de la normalité ».

Genres: Fiction, Romania, Literature, Literary Fiction, Romanian Literature, Contemporary, Novels

800 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2015

About the author

Romanian poet, novelist, essayist and a professor at the University of Bucharest.

Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language And Literature, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher, and then he worked at the Writers Union and as an editor at the Caiete Critice magazine. In 1991 he became a lecturer at the Chair of Romanian Literary History, part of the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters. As of 2010, he is an associate professor. Between 1994-1995 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

Among his writings: "Nostalgia" (a full edition of the earlier published "Visul"), 1993, "Travesti" 1994, "Orbitor" 2001, "Enciclopedia zmeilor" ("The Encyclopedia of Dragons") 2002, "Pururi tânãr, înfãsurat în pixeli" ("Forever young, convolved in pixels") 2002, "De ce iubim femeile" bestseller ("Why do we love women") 2004.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solenoid is an intellectual dark comedy exuding the aura both of a postmodernistic dystopia and an absurdist horror tale…
Solenoid is a cylindrical coil of wire acting as a magnet when carrying electric current.
The narration is – now already traditional – stream of consciousness. 
The narrator has lice… And the novel begins with a nauseous ode to lice…

lice cling to the thick trunks, they become one with them. Their inhuman faces show a kind of bewilderment. Their carcasses are made of the same substance as the hair. They become wet in the hot water, but they do not dissolve. Their symmetrical respiratory tubes, along the edges of their undulating abdomens, are completely shut, like the closed nostrils of sea lions.

But the book isn’t just about lice… It is also about bedbugs, beetles, larvae, mites and human beings…
Dreaming to become a writer the protagonist consumed tons of books…

For the past decade, I had forgotten to breathe, cough, vomit, sneeze, ejaculate, see, hear, love, laugh, produce white blood cells, protect myself with antibodies, I had forgotten my hair had to grow and my tongue, with its papilla, had to taste food. I had forgotten to think about my fate on Earth and about finding a wife. Lying in bed like an Etruscan statue over a sarcophagus, my sweat staining my sheets yellow, I had read until I was almost blind and almost schizophrenic.

As a youth he wrote a poem which was accepted so badly that it became a source of his decline and ruination of all hopes… Now he is a teacher in the ill-reputed school… He lives in his own house with a huge torroidal solenoid in the cellar… He writes a diary… He is obsessed with the four-dimensional space… He is full of anomalies – both physical and mental… And a lot of bizarre things are happening – to him and all around…

After the first time they gave me shots in my gums, I would have preferred not to be anesthetized, so awful was the sensation of venom diffusing into my flesh from the thick needle, like for horses, that was used back then, over and over for dozens of patients, the same way they vaccinated the entire school with a single needle. It’s no wonder, I often think, that I am packed to the gills with anomalies, hallucinations, and insanity – the only real wonder is my survival.

Any human being is a solenoid attracting all kinds of stuff, both inanimate and animate: sunrays, dust, dirt, viruses, bacteria, parasites, diseases, dreams, neuroses, insanity and also other human beings.

[Guille · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Envejecemos, esperamos tranquilos en la fila de los condenados a muerte. Somos ejecutados uno tras otro en el más atroz de los campos de concentración. Primero nos despojan de la belleza, de la juventud y de la esperanza. Nos envuelven en los ropajes de penitentes de las enfermedades, del cansancio y de la putrefacción. Se mueren nuestros abuelos, son ejecutados ante nosotros nuestros padres y de repente el tiempo se acorta, ves aparecer bruscamente ante tus ojos el filo de la guadaña.”

A veces me gusta horrores leer a Cărtărescu. A veces no sé a qué atenerme con él y quizás sea por eso que me gusta tanto leer a Cărtărescu... a veces.

Pero antes de seguir, quiero dejar bien claro que yo sí he llegado hasta la última página del libro. Lo digo por esas críticas que he encontrado en las que se hacen afirmaciones del tipo “llevo leídas 200 páginas... un 15%... un tercio de la novela... y no me hace falta más para decir que Solenoide es una obra maestra” . Sospechas de lectura incompleta que se extienden a esas otras en las que el crítico se limita a dar ciertos datos biográficos del escritor, añadir opiniones elogiosa de sus otros libros, mencionar las analogías con Pynchon, Borges, Kafka, Proust, Mann, Lovecraft y los cuatro o cinco lugares comunes que bien pudieran haber sido sacados de las siete páginas del explicativo posfacio de Marius Chivu. No me extraña, son 800 páginas de un texto muy personal y el tiempo del que se dispone es siempre limitado. Yo mismo he leído en vertical una parte no desdeñable del libro.

Y es que la novela es, y ahí va el más grande de los lugares comunes, la biblia del autor, hasta hay un fascinante remedo (¿parodia?) de hijo de dios enviado a un original y asombroso mundo con el propósito de hacerles llegar la buena nueva, aventura que el protagonista contará a sus nietos empezando con algo parecido a aquello de “he visto cosas que vosotros no creeríais” .

Como todo álbum blanco que se precie, lo contiene todo, incluidos sus excesos. Entre personajes extravagantes, escatologías varias, arquitecturas escherianas, teorías científicas singulares, ‘déjà vus’, aparecidos y estructuras laberínticas, Cărtărescu expande hasta el infinito todos sus universos oníricos, fantásticos, terroríficos, surrealistas y/o futuristas que, mezclados en un continuo con la simple cotidianidad, limita y relativiza eso que denominamos “Realidad” y que el autor pone continuamente en cuestión. El delirio, la alucinación, la locura, la mística dejan de ser anomalías humanas para convertirse en parte intrínseca de la realidad, parte relevante y reveladora, dejando ésta de ser algo exterior a nosotros para convertirse en una compleja construcción de nuestra mente y, por tanto y en principio, superable.

"Algunas veces me siento como un niño pequeño ante un tablero de ajedrez. Has cogido el peón blanco y eso está muy bien. Pero ¿por qué te lo metes en la boca? ¿Por qué agarras el tablero y lo inclinas para que todas las piezas caigan? ¿Acaso será esta la solución? ¿Ganará tal vez la partida precisamente el que comprenda de repente lo absurdo del juego y lo tire al suelo, el que corte el nudo cuando todos los demás se esfuerzan por soltarlo? "

Acepto como una de las partes más hermosas de los textos de Cărtărescu sus generosas dosis de realismo mágico, todo el sortilegio de sus metáforas, de sus símbolos, incluso me cautiva su romanticismo, el gusto por lo sombrío, por lo escondido, pero en ocasiones me siento superado por sus, para mí muchas veces incomprensibles, sucesos onírico-fantástico-góticos y, desde luego, no comparto en absoluto la importancia y la capacidad reveladora que el autor les otorga.

“Todo sueño es un mensaje, una llamada, un portal, un agujero de gusano, u objeto multidimensional que tú, al interpretar, mistificas y malgastas... recibes instrucciones vitales en una lengua desconocida o en un código imperceptible para tus sentidos y, sin embargo, sabes que ahí están la clave y la respuesta... es eso que te susurras a ti mismo, tú, que sabes mucho más, que de hecho lo sabes todo, a ti, el que no sabe que sabe."

Toda esta metafísica naif de puertas y más puertas que nos permitan salir de la cárcel que es nuestro cuerpo, de sueños que encierran planes de huida de eso que decimos que es la realidad y que tanto nos limita, toda esta cosmogonía de adolescente fumeta en la que somos como “ácaros ciegos pululando en nuestra mota de polvo” e incapaces de salir de nuestra ceguera, me deja frío y hasta un poco pasmado.

Es cierto, no me gustan las respuestas, pero también es cierto que me fascinan las preguntas.

Me seduce la esencia de este innominado escritor que lo es sin serlo, la belleza y la intensidad con la que se describe su desasosiego, la fantasía de sus quimeras, su desesperada búsqueda de esa salida de sí mismo que tanto mueve a la piedad. Me impresiona su dolor por todo lo inevitable de la vida del ser humano, su candorosa adhesión al grito de los Piquetistas “¡Abajo la muerte! ¡No a la resignación!”. Me conmueve la melancolía y la nostalgia que tiñen sus recuerdos de Bucarest a pesar de la situación política y social de aquella ciudad gris y ruinosa de los años 80, la más triste y melancólica del mundo. Me enternece las posibilidades que el autor vislumbra en la literatura, su denuncia de los libros inofensivos y ornamentales, su ciega embestida contra la resignación ante la derrota.

“El mundo se ha llenado de millones de novelas que escamotean el único sentido que ha tenido la literatura: el de comprenderte a ti mismo hasta el final, hasta la única cámara del laberinto de tu mente en la que no te esté permitido entrar. Los únicos textos que deberían ser leídos son los no-artísticos, los no-literarios, los ásperos e imposibles de entender, esos que fueron escritos por unos autores locos pero que brotaron de su demencia, de su tristeza y de su desesperación como manantiales del agua viva.”

Y tras este gran viaje repleto de tiras y aflojas, Cărtărescu da un último salto mortal en las últimas páginas que vuelve a dejarme pasmado y sin saber a qué atenerme. Una gran vuelta de tuerca con devastadores efectos sobre todo lo leído que, vuelvo a repetir, son casi 800 páginas de búsquedas y más búsquedas de puertas y más puertas que nos permitan salvar todas nuestras limitaciones.

En fin, Marius Chivu acierta en muchas de las ideas que sobre el libro expone en el posfacio, y no es el menor de sus aciertos la advertencia de la bastedad de Solenoide y su potencialidad infinita en la interacción con cada lector. Será por eso que, a pesar de todo, me gusta horrores leer a Cărtărescu.


P.D. Para ser justo, me gustaría matizar mis discrepancias con esos supuestos conductos de escape de los que nos habla el autor. Además de su respuesta final, nada original pero seguramente la única digna de tener en cuenta, creo que hay otra más que, relacionada estrechamente con la anterior, y bellamente expuesta aquí por Cărtărescu, puedo suscribir en su totalidad y decir, como dijo el poeta, si Dios existe, es sexo puro.

“En el mundo sin espacio ni tiempo de la voluptuosidad infinita, paraíso infernal e infierno celeste, tuve de repente un orgasmo inigualable, como la brusca apertura en el cráneo de una inflorescencia criminal y sublime. Supe entonces que en realidad no existen ni el yo ni la voluntad ni la razón ni la piel ni los órganos internos, que más allá de su ilusión hay un mundo esculpido en placer, placer puro, como un estallido cegador más allá del cual no existe siquiera la nada.”

P.P.D. Aunque no concibo una realidad encubridora de mensajes trascendentales que deban ser encontrados, leídos y descifrados; aunque no comulgue con realidades imperceptibles a los sentidos preñadas de respuestas existenciales, no dejan de asombrarme algunas casualidades.

“Solenoide” es una novela sobre el fracaso que gira en torno a un joven escritor y marido fracasado, una novela que se lamenta del fracaso de la literatura, del fracaso de cualquier grito de socorro, del gran fracaso de la vida que son el dolor y la muerte. ¿Y qué autor ejemplifica como nadie la estética del fracaso y del infortunio, qué escritor sostenía la quimérica aspiración de ser “un cero bien redondo”? Efectivamente, Robert Walser, casualmente el autor que acababa de leer en su maravillosa “Los hermanos Tanner”. Como pura casualidad fue seguramente que el libro con el que compaginé la lectura de “Solenoide” fuera la novela de Vila-Matas “Aires de Dylan”. En ella se narra una rocambolesca historia que se inicia en un congreso literario dedicado al fracaso y que, entre un escritor que siente su fracaso al final de su carrera y otro que prefiere la inacción y el fracaso buscado a la posibilidad del fracaso real, también se mencionan temas tan solenoidanos como son las realidades últimas, las conexiones extrañas que nos enlazan a todos y con todo, los sueños transmitidos entre diferentes mentes…, aunque bien es verdad que aquí con un claro sentido irónico (¿sólo aquí?).

Un libro este de Vila-Matas que también ofrece una respuesta: “¿Para qué tanto esfuerzo si a fin de cuentas, como decía Voltaire, «nadie ha encontrado ni encontrará jamás»? ¿No sería mejor tratar de vivir en un «estado poético»?”

¿Casualidad?

P.P.P.D. Y por si fuera poco, acabo de empezar la lectura de un libro titulado “La puerta secreta”, de Marlen Haushofer.

¿Hay alguien ahí que está intentando decirme algo? Si es así, por favor, hable más claro.

[Chris Via]

Video now available: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Aitk0...

Cărtărescu brings Proust, Borges, and Kafka into a 21-st-century idiom.

One of the best books I have ever read.

I need to think more on this--but I'm inclined to say something crazy like: this is the best 21-st-century novel I've read so far.

[Adina ( not enough time )]

Book 8/13

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025
English Translation by Sean Cotter

DNF and this time for good.

I was sure it was going to win the Booker international , but it wasn't to be. On my 3rd attempt, I reached page 150 and I am happy I gave this novel another chance. I am not going to go further, since I am not part of its readership. Also, because it is too bleak. However, I appreciate what the author is doing here andI agree it is very well written. Who should read it? People who like surreal long books such as Pynchon, Wallace, Gaddis etc.

One more thing, the translation is exceptional. I read the book in Romanian and listened to it in English and the atmosphere was identical. Sean Cotter did an amazing job with such a difficult novel.


***
Now Longlisted for Booker International Prize 2025

Winner of the Dublin Literary Award

3rd time lucky? This is my 3rd attempt to read the novel. I am insisting because he is a fellow Romanian and it's been a while since and author from my country got so much recognition. I am trying to listen to the audiobook in English. It is funny to hear the narrator struggling to pronounce the places and names. He does a good job though.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una maravilla. ¿Por dónde puedo empezar a hablar sobre un libro que me parece tan importante? Tengo tantas sensaciones, que quisiera elaborarlas un poco, ponerle nombre a la emoción que siento. Pero es que es una obra maestra! Aclaro que solo había leído El Levante de Cartarescu. Pero después de haber leído esta maravillosa, grotesca, fuerte, tremenda novela, me siento muy metida en el mundo Cartarescu, y muy feliz además. Se va por tantas vertientes, que creo que el tratar de explicarlas tomaría mucho tiempo. Tiene de todo! pero cuando digo de todo, hablo desde imágenes de alguna peli de ciencia ficción, en su extraña modernidad, de Kafka, metafísica, algo del mundo de Borges, de alguna peli de terror, medicina, geometría, poesía, dolor, dolor, dolor, y una tremenda y profunda soledad. Seguramente cuando el primer lector de las metamorfosis leyó esas historias allá en la época de Ovidio, estaba con la boca tan abierta como yo durante las 800 páginas de esta maravilla.
Cartarescu lleva el dolor existencial a un lugar maravilloso, de hecho no se si alguien de otra nacionalidad, o crecido en otro lugar o en otra época pudo haber escrito este libro. Estoy feliz de haber llegado a él, estoy feliz de haberlo leído, llevó los límites de la ficción a otro lugar, y el pensar y el sentir hasta lugares insospechados. Seguramente lo volveré a leer, y por ahora solo puedo decir que también seguiré hablando de el, porque estas palabras me quedaron muy caóticas, así que esperaré a que se me acomode más, y seguiré comentándolo.

Y cuando lleguen al final!...:O

[Glenn Russell]

Amazing! Solenoid is surely one of the great works of world literature from our early 21st century. For all the reasons why this is the case, please check out Dustin Illingworth's excellent review in The New York Times along with Sarah Kornfeld's review in The Los Angeles Review. Additionally, Chris Via considers Solenoid among the best books he has ever read, and explains why in his video on Youtube.

As much and at some points even more than the overarching themes and conceptual framework in the novel, I found specific passages and images especially striking. I'd like to devote my review to five among their number taken from the first chapters.

“I can't avoid lice – I teach at a school on the edge of town. Half the kids there have lice, the nurse finds the bugs at the start of the year, during her checkup, when she goes through the kids' hair with the expert motion of a chimpanzee – except she doesn't crush the lice between her teeth, stained with the chitin of previously captured insects. Instead, she recommends the parents apply a cloudy liquid that smells like lye, the same one the teachers use. Within a few days, the entire school stinks of anti-lice solution.”

Reviewers of Solenoid often mention the opening paragraph of the novel, where the unnamed narrator, whom I'll refer to as Mir, declares his struggle with lice. Mir consistently reminds us of the human condition, wherein we are perpetually besieged by insects, microbes, weather, and our fellow humans, as well as other elements in our physical surroundings, all of which can provoke irritation, intense pain, sickness, disease, and at times, even death. What intrigues me here is the nurse's adeptness in combing through the child's hair, reminiscent of a chimpanzee, while the pervasive presence of lice is such that the scent of anti-lice solution fills every corner of the school. Yikes!

“Still wandering, every day in the summer of '75, down the streets and into the houses of that torrid city, which I came to know so well, to know its secrets and turpitudes, its glory and the purity of its soul. Bucharest, as I understood it at the age of nineteen, when I had already read everything, was not like other cities that developed over time, exchanging its huts and warehouses for condominium towers, replacing horse-drawn trams with electric ones. It had appeared all at once, already ruined, shattered, with its facades fallen and its gargoyles' noses chipped, with electric wires hung over the streets in melancholic fixtures, with an imaginatively varied industrial architecture. From the very beginning, the project was to be more human, a more moving city than, for example, a concrete and glass Brasília.”

Every step of our journey through its 639 pages, we are right there with Mir, living in Bucharest during a time when the Romanian capital was under Communist rule. I can assure you that I now feel as if my passport should bear a stamp for Romania—a three-dimensional stamp that, when touched, blossoms into a Borges-like fourth dimension.

“I had read until I was almost blind and almost schizophrenic. My mind had no room left for the blue skies mirrored in the springtime pond, nor for the delicate melancholy of snowflakes sticking to a building plastered in calcio-vecchio. Whenever I opened my mouth, I spoke in quotes from my favorite authors. When I lifted my eyes from the page, in the room steeped in the rosy brown of dusk on Ștefan cel Mare , I saw the walls clearly tattooed with letters: they were poems, on the ceiling, on the mirror, on the leaves of the translucent geraniums vegetating in their pots.”

Mir reflects on his obsession with reading. We can luxuriate in the rich poetry of Mircea Cărtărescu's language, a phenomenal achievement considering the author revealed in an interview that he wrote Solenoid line by line without revision or rewriting. As he related, it was as if he was erasing a blank white page, each line a clean sweep, making his first draft his final draft. Oh, what many writers would give to have a fraction of Mircea's talent.

“I had lines written on my fingers and on the heel of my hand, poems inked on my pajamas and sheets. Frightened, I went to the bathroom mirror, where I could see myself completely: I had poems written with a needle on the whites of my eyes and poems scrawled over my forehead. My skin was tattooed in minuscule letters, maniacal, with a legible handwriting. I was blue from head to toe, I stank of ink the way others stink of tobacco. The Fall would be the sponge that sucked up all the ink from the lonely nautilus I was.”

The consequences of Mir's obsession with reading persist. His body, adorned with words, foreshadows the diverse phases of a supercharged, frequently eerie, magical mystery tour we'll encounter throughout Solenoid, including the supernatural and mystical properties of the electromagnetic solenoid coils hidden underground at select spots in Bucharest. Furthermore, The Fall, Mir's poem spanning thirty handwritten pages, plays a pivotal role in the tale.

“As long as I can remember, I have had a strong feeling of predestination. The very act of opening my eyes in the world made me feel like I was chosen – because they weren't a spider's eyes, they weren't the thousands of hexagons of a fly's eye, they weren't the eyes on the tips of a snail's horns; because I didn't come into the world as a bacterium or a myriapod. The enormous ganglion of my brain, I felt, predestined me to an obsessive search for a way out. I understood I must use my brain like an eye, open and observant under the skull's transparent shell, able to see with another kind of sight and to detect fissures and signs, hidden artifacts and obscure connections in this test of intelligence, patience, love, and faith that is this world.”

Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid contains incredible power. Special thanks to Sean Cotter for his stunning translation. I had to read (and listen to the audio book) in small chunks over the course of several months in order to absorb its torrential force. This is a novel that deserves to be more than read. It must be lived.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

A depiction of the remarkable richness of one man's inner life amid the bodily poverty and blindingly dull inheritance of the paltry years allotted to him on a damaged and ravaged earth in a squalid and unforgiving metropolis. Drenched in cosmic surrealism and accoutered with interlocking symbols.

The author pursues central questions and then intersperses scenes from childhood and adulthood in alternating sequences. We see through the nameless semi-autobiographical protagonist's eyes how creative exercises represent escape and salvation and how other people often baffle and astound, while ultimately offering little comfort or validation. We are led to believe we are following the travails of a god in a mite’s body. Bodily decay and mental acuity are two aspects of the main character endlessly explored in morphing contours of imagery. He contemplates the infinities contained within us to comprehend the jigsaw pieces of the universe but claims there is neither the time nor the strength to meaningfully change anything in this wheel of existence.

So he takes refuge in the solitary pleasure of reading and discovering new worlds through language. This is a theme as old as time but is the theme of Cărtărescu's life. The incommunicable dreams and thoughts of our inner lives consumes the greater part of our energy. Cultivating inner totalities may be the only way to cope with a hideous world. These are some of the answers the author posits.

Meanwhile, he contracts a phobia of dentist chairs, which are transmogrified into pain extraction devices, sucking, gurgling, grinding torture mechanisms, which in turn become stand-ins for a society built upon menial work, set against the childhood wonder and the majesty of the natural world like a stain in a pristine masterwork. His fascinations with butterflies and caverns manifest in several ways, recurring in the bones of the human body - some of which are shaped like butterflies, and the vacuous spaces therein, and the translucent flesh sacs that are our organs. He conjures attics of the mind, carving out gray matter and stuffing the spaces with secluded wonders, libraries of babel. Through the medium of his diary he wanders through mental abysses and ascends toward the lofty Dantean peaks. From those endless pages he has promised us in his interviews, he filters the world through the senses, through the dream-harrowed mind, copying them out and smudging the boundaries between experience and invention. He combines this with the pursuit of science and an appreciation of sexual pleasure and their peculiar perceived connection to the soul. Galaxies intermingle in his reveries with drooling cityscapes, Eastern European hubs the ghost architectures of which come equipped with translucent walls like some teeming superorganism.

The slide into surreal dimensions is drastic, and results in the perception other realities. In many ways, imagination and perception become inextricable. The Voynich manuscript makes an appearance, finding its analogue in the recognition of the impossibility of reading meaning into the chaotic universe, or of deciphering the DNA of our behavior or the purpose of human life. We drift in self-created heavens and hells. He is visited by madness, suicide, and medication in his study of famous minds, depicting many descents into institutionalization and orphanhood.

Bucharest rises like a rabid beast, faceted with Gothic precision. He incorporates Gaia theory and points out all of the shameful preponderances of our race. He circles back to the solenoid, a magical device in his room, which allows him to hover above the bed, facilitating heightened dream states. In some places he regards technology as occult magic, even going on a long tangent about enchanted glassware, and Tesla coils all the while marrying his readable style with an ornate vocabulary. He expresses a contempt for the study of lepidoptera but seems to have delved in it himself and adorns his literary masterpieces with insectoid daydreams.

We are introduced to his teaching life, and the separate existence of his writing, when like Pessoa, he documents the mundane abstractions of a tortured, brilliant mind with nothing to occupy itself. The art of writing for art’s sake propels him forward. We witness marital death, the impediments of a Philistine populace, and the hinderances of the body. He experiences the angst of a man with intellectual proclivities swallowed by a backward civilization. There is no end to his conjuring of desolate landscapes, inescapable torments, and Lovecraftian visions of parallel irrealities.

Toward the end we meet the figure of Palamar, who introduces our narrator to the study of mites, their fascinating preponderance, and their strange multifariousness, which branches into the examination of the symbiosis of all living things, parasitism, the nightmarish aspects of the microscopic world, and the gigantism of the universe. The atomic and quantum realms are contrasted with cosmic imagery, and spiritual versus the physical attributes are dissected. The stark difference of his 2 marriages seem like further examples of the weird and unpredictable fates waiting like unopened doors in the mansions of our lives.

The question of whether you’d save the masterpiece or the infant from the burning building is repeated like a refrain. The times when the flipped coin is neither heads nor tails but lands on its edge is another obsessive possibility which keeps him in thrall. Any instance of slipping through the cracks of the universal laws interests and consumes him. Do you ever detect the presence of higher-dimensional beings, or spin off into Dalian reveries? Do your inner landscapes resemble Boschian panoplies? Then you'll be at home in Cărtărescu's freewheeling imagination, slathering every page with rich, dense circuitries of flesh and machine, like Cronenberg behind the camera, the paramour of Romanian literature contains the symphonies of the spheres in a visual feast of interior experience. We are left with spirit and body, the dualities of human experience. We can only be awed by the diversity of forms in the animal kingdoms, the majesty of anatomies, and the opposing forces of interior and exterior.

Finally, you must choose your master: There are only 2 fears: the fear of god and the fear of man. If you fear one you do not fear the other.

This is more than a dream diary, more than an autobiography. It is another life you might live vicariously. And an unforgettable one.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solenoid is the highly anticipated English translation of Mircea Cărtărescu's original by the same title. Acclaimed in its original Romanian, Solenoid became a phenomenon with Marian Ochoa de Eribe's Spanish translation, followed by others. Now we have Sean Cotter's work in English, published in the US by Deep Vellum Press. It has certainly been worth the wait. Cărtărescu's hallucinatory prose lives up to the hype, the novel an ever-expanding series of fever dreams that range from the quirky to the just plain weird. Some of the passages are exquisite. The best are a blend of autofictional realism with dream logic that read like an homage to Kafka and others. I was prepared for philosophical fireworks, but the fluidity and otherworldliness of the prose stole the show. Cotter deserves a good deal of credit for that. I don't think it's quite the masterwork it's billed as, in part because the book reads like a director's cut in want of a firm edit. The length isn't a problem per se, but tightening this from almost 650 pages down to, say, 500 would have given it the focus and punch it was lacking. There were also heavy doses of misogyny and racism from the disgruntled (male) narrator, which were a major distraction. Despite these flaws, Solenoid is an unforgettable reading experience, surely the most memorable book I'll read this year.

[Ana Cristina Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer (aviso a navegantes): En ningún momento esta reseña puede ser interpretada como una recomendación y/o incitación a la lectura de la mencionada obra y los lectores que se aventuren en sus páginas lo hacen bajo su propia responsabilidad y sin posibilidad de reclamar compensación por cualquier perjuicio físico o mental que la lectura les pueda ocasionar.

Aclarado este punto, tengo que decir que Cartarescu me ha deslumbrado con su oscuridad. Pocas lecturas me han impactado tan profundamente en los últimos tiempos. Solenoide no quiere ser una novela, quiere ser la vida, el mundo, el tiempo. Son 800 páginas de prosa poética que pueden agotar al más pintado y al mismo tiempo llenarte de visiones cegadoras. Es difícil describir con palabras lo que supone penetrar el universo Cartarescu por primera vez, como ha sido mi caso. Creo que esta obra busca transcender la literatura como tal, encontrar la cuarta dimensión que la convierta en un instrumento de salvación, de la misma manera en que el protagonista – trasunto del autor – busca incansable la huida de la doble prisión que nos atenaza: el mundo y el cuerpo.

El mundo es un puzle multidimensional, una cárcel metafísica limitada por los cinco sentidos y las tres dimensiones.

Somos prisioneros en cárceles concéntricas y múltiples. Soy prisionero de mi mente, que es prisionera de mi cuerpo, que es prisionero del mundo.

Estas prisiones son las que generan el dolor que acompaña a la condición humana desde el principio de los tiempos. Contra este sufrimiento implacable - especialmente el que ocasiona la conciencia de la propia mortalidad - se rebela el movimiento de los piquetistas, al que se une el autor en una búsqueda desesperada de signos que conduzcan al lugar que les permita escapar:

Todo sueño es un mensaje, una llamada, un portal, un agujero de gusano, un objeto multidimensional que tú, al interpretar, mistificas y malgastas.

Hay una cara de Solenoide formada por una vertiente onírica, poética, un surreal universo paralelo lleno de señales y magia. Pero no es menos interesante la otra parte en que Cartarescu nos obsequia con fragmentos que describen la vida cotidiana del protagonista como profesor en una escuela de barrio y nos sitúa en el Bucarest del régimen caduco de Ceaucescu, con una habilidad narradora y un humor impresionantes. Es este contraste entre las dos facetas de Solenoide lo que me ha parecido más notable.

La ciudad de Bucarest es un protagonista importante de la narración y las descripciones de sus calles y cielos abundan, como un espacio mágico y surreal, deteriorado pero lleno de elementos esotéricos:

Le fascinaban sus mercados con las ventanas rotas, los enternecedores adornos de estuco colgados de cornisas y balcones como un pueblo de lisiados que elevaran sus muñones vengativos al cielo.

Es una obra rica, riquísima, resumen de toda la filosofía de Cartarescu, pero quizá he sido imprudente empezando por aquí mi conocimiento de su obra. Son 800 páginas y el autor no hace el más mínimo esfuerzo por editarlas ni evitar repeticiones. Hacia mitad del libro he sentido fatiga por ver las mismas metáforas y consideraciones una y otra vez, como si estuviera avanzando en círculos. Cartarescu sabe entretener cuando quiere, pero la mayor parte del tiempo no quiere. Denso? Sí. Vale la pena? En mi caso sí, el universo Cartarescu se ha incorporado a mi imaginario lector como un lugar muy especial, y en mi opinión muy cercano al de Dante y Lovecraft, entre muchos otros.

[Simona Cosma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am ales sa scriu recenzia în această seară, la o zi după încheierea lecturii si la câteva ceasuri după întalnirea cu Mircea Cărtărescu, cu ocazia lansarii Solenoidului la Cluj.
Nu aș putea spune ca în urma acestei întâlniri mi s-au modificat notabil starile inițiale de receptare a romanului, însa am preferat să am, în mod particular, anumite confirmări de percepție.
Nu îmi propun să îndemn pe cineva să citească Solenoid; publicitatea furtunoasă de care a avut parte reușește mult mai bine decât mine să facă acest lucru.
Romanul are o dimensiune prohibitivă şi deja e notorie asemănarea primei sale părţi cu Orbitor, aşa că unora li se va putea părea redundant efortul de a parcurge 840 de pagini pentru a afla, practic, aceleaşi istorii.
Lucrurile nu stau însă chiar aşa. Solenoid nu este o extensie fără noimă a Orbitorului.
Binecunoscutul nostru personaj are aici altă menire şi un cu totul alt mesaj. Odiseea lui de dascăl şi abjecţia vieţii de profesor din comunismul anilor '80 sunt doar naraţiuni-pretext, menite să dea coerenţă cărţii şi facă mai lizibil mesajul, la al cărui sens mistic am să mă refer mai jos.
Pe scurt, profesorul fără nume, (un Mircea Cărtărescu "aşa cum NU a fost"), vine în faţa unui cenaclu literar, plin de aşteptări şi nădejde, cu volumul sau de debut. Acest volum, spre stupefacţia lui, este dispreţuit şi spulberat fără milă de confraţi şi de critici. Întors acasă, năucit şi devastat, hotărăşte să renunţe pentru totdeauna la literatura publică şi începe sa scrie un jurnal, un manuscris, exclusiv pentru sine, fără presiunea cititorilor sau a criticii, în care îşi va permite, pentru prima oară, luxul de a fi el însuşi.
Reflectoarele vor fi puse, în mod alternativ, pe două planuri ale existenţei profesorului: un plan diurn şi un plan nocturn. În cel diurn este un simplu profesor de limba română, cu o existenţa liniară şi inerţială, iar în cel nocturn devine un Ales, un călător într-un periplu iniţiatic, care evadează din chingile circumstanţelor sociale şi senzoriale, şi explorează - singur şi înspăimântat - cea de-a a patra dimensiune şi cel de-al şaselea simț.
Mesajul mistic din Solenoid, chiar dacă e transmis în registru puternic suprarealist, este foarte explicit; unora li s-ar putea părea blasfemiator sau eretic (scena Judecăţii de Apoi a marilor scriitori, Epifania din lumea inferioară a acarienilor, sau fuga din calea Apocalipsei a reîntruchipatei Sacre Familii cu Pruncul). Altora li s-ar putea revela chiar hristic în sens neotestamentar (episoadele în care, din iubire, refuză să treacă prin uşa deschisă ce îi permite doar lui translarea în dimensiunea a patra, alegând să își continue existenţa umană, terestră, alături de femeia şi copilul său, ori atunci când, din aceeaşi dragoste, alege să îşi azvârle în foc manuscrisul, salvând copilul).
În ce mă priveşte, eu îmi recunosc și îmi asum slăbiciunea pentru orice scriere cu mesaj mesianic şi probabil de aceea l-am primit cu multă îngăduință și înduioşare pe nefericitul Mesia însingurat, neînțeles și apoi ucis, al acarienilor. Exponenţial privind, şi noi, omenirea, l-am primit şi respins în mod similar pe Hristos.
Toate aceste lucruri ar fi putut fi spuse în mai puţine cuvinte, în mai puţin de 840 de pagini? Într-o scriere mai puțin istovitoare și care sa îți reclame mai puține lecturi adiționale pentru a se face înțeleasa?
Poate că da, poate că nu.
Un cvartet de coarde nu poate avea, totuși, sound-ul unei orchestre.

10 februarie 2016

[Marc Kozak · Rating 5 out of 5]

ATTENTION: people in that special group of weirdos who can't get enough of the crazily ambitious, head-spinning, density-defying, forearm-straining mega-novels. You lovers of Pynchon, Gaddis, Joyce, DFW, all that. Run out and buy Solenoid right away. If you're not already inclined to seek out that kind of stuff then I can't imagine what you would make of this, but if you regularly engage in and enjoy reading those universe-containing cinder blocks (and you're okay with getting a little weird), this might become your new favorite book.

That isn't to say it's as outwardly complicated as some of the stuff from the authors I just named. You won't get lost. In fact, there isn't really even a plot at all. It's basically a 700-page journal written by a fictional Romanian schoolteacher, told without regard for chronology, containing reflections on his youth, his mother, his job, his extremely strange dreams, and his increasing certainty that the many surreal anomalies of his life all form some kind of meaningful pattern.

This was one of those rare books that took me a super long time to read, but for all the best reasons. Sure, it's a long book, but that wasn't really an issue. For one thing, due to the fact that there isn't really an overarching narrative, you can just read as many pages or chapters as you want, put it down for a while and come back to it with no problems. And as time went on, I actively wanted to read in that leisurely kind of way. I was enjoying it so much that it was nice to spend a month or two knowing that I had more pages to come back to.

And the prose! The language! The vocabulary!!! I seriously cannot believe this is a translated work. All props to translator Sean Cotter for what must have been a behemoth task. There are beautiful sentences on every single page, with so many staggeringly unique metaphors that will make you stop reading, look into the middle distance and say to yourself, ok that was real good. Of particular note is Cărtărescu's extraordinary usage of anatomical words and descriptions of the inner workings of the human body. No body part or fluid is left unmentioned, in all of its gory glory.

As you might be able to tell by now, this book is not only incredibly strange but oftentimes very gross. His depiction of Bucharest is one of a ruined, failure of a city, stinking and festering, with everything in decay, both people and places alike. If the city was a body, it's one of a very old man, coughing and sputtering just before he can't get up again.

And then there's the many stories that veer wildly off into the surreal. Abandoned factories are found to have giant, building-sized babies in them. Larvae attach to people's eyes and control their thoughts. A cult that protests against death is crushed by a giant statue. Beds levitate, aliens abduct janitors, teachers end up being automatons, anything and everything could be a secret code with an urgent message, and abandoned rooms contain strange portals to other worlds. It's tempting to call portions of this book magical realism, and it certainly owes a debt to Borges, Kafka and García Márquez, but I would say it has more in common with the cosmic dread of Lovecraft. That being said, it's very much its own unique style, unlike anything I've ever read before.

Our narrator is convinced that the world is a sinister trap, and he is one of the very few that can see the signs and try to "escape," into the unknown or possibly to another plane of existence altogether. It certainly sounds bleak (and I guess it is) but the stories are so fantastical that it doesn't ever feel like it's too much. It could be that Cărtărescu is writing from a very modern viewpoint, one of nihilism and despair, and this book is his way of escape, of rejecting the idea that there isn't something better to hope for somewhere, even if it is another universe, or as another kind of being. Maybe this is just optimistic me talking here, but I never got the impression that this was a book written without hope. At the very least, it's a cry out to find refuge in the imagination and the telling of impossible stories.

I dunno guys, I was really blown away by this and I think it's really going to find its audience over the next few years -- it was already in the New Yorker's list of the best books of 2022, which is just crazy to me for some reason; or maybe I've just gotten old enough to be that pretentious middle-aged white guy that is targeted by the New Yorker. That hurts a little bit. Anyway, I'd encourage any fellow weirdos reading this to give this a shot, and just go along for the ride for a while and see how it feels.

[Lucas Sierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Para hacer justicia a lo que acabo de terminar de leer no servirá nada de lo escrito aquí. Serviría, quizás, una hoguera, y en ella arrojar todas las páginas garrapateadas con letra menuda que llenan mi escritorio y mis cajones; serviría un agujero negro donde tirar mis libros, mis dibujos, mis reseñas; serviría un silencioso abandonar el libro y quedarse mirando la pared en blanco hasta pulverizarse los ojos.

Mircea Cărtărescu no ha escrito un libro, ha creado un universo orgánico, capaz de respirar y reproducirse. Los otros libros del autor están en Solenoide, no como referencias, ni siquiera como una propuesta metaliteraria: hacen parte del otro lado del espejo, justifican la realidad de esta obra con su propia existencia. La apuesta en el texto, la pregunta por quién es aquel soñando el sueño donde soñamos, es demoledora y comentarlo es esforzarse en reducir apalabrando una emoción tumultuosa.

Digo lo anterior para justificarme. No voy a hablar de lo recién leído. No podría hablar de lo recién leído. Este libro me ha acompañado por un mes largo y estará conmigo hasta el ocaso de mi vida. Lo reeleré, estoy seguro, al menos una vez al año. Vino para quedarse, junto a otros pocos, en aquellos textos sagrados de nuestra vida.

Este libro es un laberinto increíble. Léanlo. Piérdanse en él. Es la única forma de conseguir alas, así sean de cera.

Adenda: Siempre me han causado gracia los lectores iconoclastas, quienes blanden el "matarás a tus ídolos" como una justificación pacata de la mesura adecuada al momento de comentar una obra de arte. Me causan gracia, además, porque queman figuras tutelares con la facilidad del pirómano aficionado, debido, en gran medida, a que los ídolos ardientes no son nunca, en realidad, sus verdaderos ídolos. Para quemar a un dios hay que creer en él, hay que rezarle llorando, hay que buscar su amor con cada fibra del ser. De otro modo lo que se quema no es un dios, es cualquier otra cosa. Gran felicidad encuentro cuando encuentro escritores cuyas cumbres respeto y amo, esos ídolos tutelares de mi vida lectora y mi vida escritora. Allí están Parra y Borges, y Cărtărescu está ocupando un lugar eminente junto a ellos. Los amaré y cuando sea capaz de prenderles fuego será cada chispa una forma de oración.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have absolutely nothing pertinent to say about this book, if you choose to read beyond this point you are tacitly acquiescing (a redundant, semantic hobgoblin which I did not geld when it sprung fully formed from my aphasic, electroencephalographically challenged mind-grapes, because my favorite stuffed animal as a child was repellent to nominal aesthetes and I zealously defended him - Zugly, that is - against anything inimical to his continued existence as the most hideous confection of plush or terry cloth or dirty gym socks or synthetic fiber or batting or wool or whatever the shitgibbon did indeed constitute the dermal material which kept the huggable monster’s - Zugly, I mean - fluffy, cotton viscera from exploding like dandelion puff every time I struck someone full force in the gonads with his hard plastic eyeballs and watched their bemused faces reconfigured by crashing waves of nausea into a silent query: how has this small child armed with a stuffy smote my bollox so mortally?) to a dangerous game of logorrheic brinkmanship in which I continue to press against our communal lexical immurement like an anaerobic bacteria doing primal arithmetic inside a can of peaches. I am that unsightly protuberance which signals that botulinum enrichment of coconut milk has reached a toxic apogee. I do this not out of any desire to express or (retch) communicate something profound, but because of conspicuous structural abnormalities in my HPTA I cannot help arranging words like neutron reflecting beryllium around fissionable conceptual material (preferably spherical so that the chimeric core has the minimum possible surface area for its mass) in the hopes that everything goes critical and gives everyone the worst three-dimensional sunburn since Louis Slotin made a fatal jimmy with his screwgie. So that’s what you have here. Furthermore, I suggest that any review you read of this book which doesn’t contain some, like, protasis in which much vexation is professed, (sans the smiting of balls with glass eyes, if they must), some exordium in which bafflement is registered, (without recourse to similes in which language becomes a botulism outbreak, should they so choose) an introduction in which the following is candidly expressed or insinuated: “My brain has been burned to ash by the radiant imaginings of Mr. Cărtărescu.” Then I submit to you (although I would never, because - as in the case of Stephen Dedalus who, channeling his instigator’s noncompliance across the political, spiritual, and artistic spectrum, said: Non serviam - I’m built diffident (wait, that’s not it.), that you’re dealing with someone who is practicing a form of haruspicy (sans organs) in which meaning is being imputed to the peristaltic (a word which sees such conspicuous use in this Sheep’s Liver Palimpsest that one might reasonably assume some thematic significance regarding the functioning of organic chitterlings - and indeed one is treated to certain images at the narrative’s pseudo-terminus that seem to me an articulation of the unity of our senseless suffering and the invisible (although in this case plainly visible) umbilicus which connects humanity to that which craves and derives nourishment from its, like, existential situation) motions of your mother’s esophagus as it contracts to move bits of bran bolus down alimentary avenue as if it were a Neolithic PowerPoint presentation and they’re exclaiming, “I have successfully stitched these fragmentary episodes of febrile somnambulism into a meaningful trajectory!” At which point you gum their trapezius nerve vigorously with the naked sock puppet of your metacarpus in crude semblance of a certain Vulcan martial technique and bear down with such passionate intensity that your gums secrete blood all in the hopes of rendering them unconscious so that you may deface their body with permanent marker by scrawling “DUMBASS” across their most visible commercial property and perhaps pocket a pack of Marlboro lights in the process.

Here we come to the dilemma of attempting to review any book of sufficient hallucinatory complexity: In attempting to parse its meaning, (for we are biologically impelled to impose meaningful interpretations on nebulous stimuli) we develop a kind of tension with the mere experience of it. The feelings it engenders which are prior to, larger than, but fundamentally constituent of/to - language - are at once set upon by the semantic imperatives which compose the software of our thinking, and the ceaseless and autonomic attempt to configure these feelings in a way which minimizes ambiguity is both murder and birth. It strikes me - the thought, I mean - that books of this kind are less about emptying their contents into you, as they are partitions in which your personal development, psychological idiosyncrasies, and assorted heuristics adumbrate and form the hard mineral skeleton of the dream-tissue therein presented. And here I can’t help but note that I’ve once more evinced the perennial, annoying quality which I freshly impugned - making sense, that is - and I would prefer to once more direct your attention to the image of an adult with their arms expectantly akimbo as a young girl (her hair in glossy ribbons) bounds up to them with her power level hidden behind the expert manifestation of certain physiological cues which suggest spontaneous and exuberant fondness, but who is in fact storing up a fiendish payload of kinetic energy to deposit in their pubical terrarium with a pirouette driven Zugly to the fuglies (a burgeoning obsession with Mike Tyson having informed the kinesthetic chain of an effective punch, starting with the foot pivoting hard as if grinding out a gasper, the posterior chain torquing, and the Snuggly whipping from the shoulder and snapping at the wrist to punch through the pudenda) that sounds like a Wiffle ball bat slapping a rotten pumpkin dressed in wet Levi’s, causing the man in question to go, like, “Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” (Paraphrasing) and lament that one of his nuts has three sixty’ed and cut off circulation of his spermatic cord, which he summarizes as, “Little bitch got me good.” Before genuflecting before the God of gastroenteritis and upchucking violently and adding, “Stole my fucking smokes too!” Now let me call your attention to something Ezra Pound said about the three aspects of poetry. Melopoeia - when words are charged beyond their normal meaning with some musical property which further directs its meaning, inducing emotional correlations by sound and rhythm of the speech. Phanopoeia - defined as “a casting of images upon the visual imagination, throwing the object (fixed or doubling over to clutch the CEO of his germ line) on the visual imagination. Logopoeia - defined by Pound as poetry that uses words for more than just their direct meaning, stimulating the visual imagination with Phanopoeia and inducing emotional correlations with Melopoeia. Now you may anticipate where I’m going with this - that’s good, guard the family jewels - there is a certain resonance, an intellectual play amongst words, that only a subset of books can capture. I submit to you (I’d rather expire with the mighty shudder of a clubbed tarpon) that many books, even classic works, translate seamlessly into film without losing anything essential. Picture Charles Dickens. Perhaps these screenplays are even better when instantiated directly in a visual medium. No offense intended towards your favorite film script, (unless you’re the kind of captious individual who I cannot help but goad because your impotent and often inarticulate rage sustains me in a way that even psychoactive chemicals cannot), as writing that finds its primary, and perhaps soul (that’s not it), locus of animation in your occipital lobe is not an unworthy pursuit (although arbitration regarding the use (or abuse) of one's timely legal tender, I leave to more refined sensibilities). But the books I’m speaking of (this being one of them) would not survive the migration between mediums. What occurs between a book as art - here speaking specifically of Solenoid - and your cytoplasmic soup, this complexly layered interaction between symbol and synapse, is not commutable between substrates, and what gets exported into a written review, being an ersatz replication of ‘that which comes before’, is an act (albeit an occasionally beautiful one) of dissimilation - the review, that is.

Now some of the more perspicacious among you who actually deign to read these anti-reviews might intimate a circuitous cop out in all this. An abdication of my responsibility to inform other potential readers of what to expect or how I felt. But since I have consistently done neither, I choose to remain unburdened by collective pieties or fellow feeling. However, given years of conditioning at the hands of semantic alchemists, you may be searching for patterns in the numerous ball-bashing anecdotes so liberally here embedded. Perhaps thinking that I am establishing some crude overlap with the author’s repeated use of Orthodontic Recliners to signify the ubiquitous, inescapable absurdity of human frailty and how we are thrust back upon ourselves by our own mortality again and again. About how Ernest Becker’s character-armor masks and obscures genuine self-knowledge by forcing us to flee this omnipresent anxiety with strategies as varied as politics is sophistry, (failed attempt at Logopoeia number one). “She’s hotboxing them behind the Church, I can smell it!” Man not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now. There remains, throughout Solenoid, these holons of decomposition. Modern universal symbols of organic dispersion. The hospital bed. The dental chair. Colonies of parasitic organisms. Dense profusions of organic circuitry revealed beneath the appearance of mechanical objects. Bones. Navel lint. But you would be disastrously wrong in thinking that I’m coyly outlining my thoughts on this book within these apocrypha. I am now assuring you in the strongest possible terms that people really did suffer explosive pain on occasions when they mistook the opportunity for a hug, that’s all. I mean sure, if you wanted to make a movie of it you could cover all the ostensible bits, such as the oneiric narrator in his youth exchanging any semblance of lived experience for the surrogate ones he taps through books. (Something he later laments with a viciousness and beauty which packs within its prose-payload enough energy to carry most books past the finish even if their remaining contents were insipid beyond imagining. Condemning these as trompe l'oeil, (from which I excise the hyphen and ligature without remorse), illusions spawned from a criminal abuse of the laws of perspective which bare (hmm) primary culpability for Wile E. Coyote’s ongoing TBI). The fulcrum on which this branch of the multiverse bifurcates (failed attempt at Logopoeia number two) would make for an exquisite moment of second-hand embarrassment if expressed cinematically as our lit-tipsy narrator presenting a poem he is certain will spooge the prodigal sons and daughters of belles lettres with his bursting eminence, only to be laid low by life's capriciousness in the form of a beady eyed alien headbutting him in the scrotal-plexus - metaphorically speaking - thus causing him to become an acutely whiny bitch the likes of which the apotheosis of all unexpected nutshocks to the self esteem - that perpetually beaten-dog-faced pope of pessimism: Cioran - himself might've recommended an aggressive treatment of antidepressants. What progresses is a journal-cum-antinovel of a schoolteacher reflecting on his youth, his mother, his job, his disturbing dreams and his overwhelming intuitions that the anomalies of his life constitute an inscrutable pattern which he can only be solved through: raunchy, buoyant coitus powered by anti-grav technology, prosthelytizing before giant, levitating step-on-me-mommie mecha, attempting to fathom unintuitive hyperdimensional topologies via Charles Howard Hinton’s formulation of the tesseract and it's more Pedestrian offspring: The Rubik's Cube, being traumatized by the near death visions of a forensic scientist who experimented with autoasphyxiation (Nicolae Minovici), probing the mysteries of the dream cults and other historical divagations, contemplating the many other versions of himself whose Nuggs did not get Zugged when attempting to imminent (that's not it) spray, mounting a full-scale attack on the boundaries between fact and fiction, numerous excursii into realms surreal and sublime across levels of analysis, grappling with the tragicomic vestiges of Romanian Communism, collecting teeth and extruded sutures, picking nits, and so on and so fourth (that's not it).

- The word, that is -

(failed attempt at Logopoeia number three)

But this would exclude, almost in its entirety:

"An endlessly ramifying series of set-piece grotesques."

"The unpredictable shock of a particularly compelling image."

"Oh you little bitch! You got me AGAIN!"

"Repeated figures or motifs played in obsessive variations."

"Surfaces and barriers, from walls to the folds of our skin, the convolutions of our brains, the whole imaginative world of the dermatillomaniac."

"A constant vocabulary of spaces within spaces, the fractal repetition of structures, of tunnels, tentacles, wombs, placentas, all the nautilus shells that human organisms fill almost to bursting."

And so on and so fith.

[Francesco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proust richiamava le rimembranze della sua infanzia con la madeline, il protagonista di questo libro con i pidocchi mentre si sta lavando. questo libro è una recherche di nulla, una messa nera un'allucinazione abbacinante, l'intera trilogia abbacinante condensata in un unico libro. Bucarest dannata, cupa, mondo in miniatura e apocalisse in grandiosità. Bucarest è un vaso di Pandora senza il coperchio. un anonimo professore che ogni giorno ha a che fare con i problemi dei suoi colleghi e con il non studio dei suoi studenti... quello stesso tram che da casa lo porta a scuola e viceversa ogni giorno per anni mentre fuori dai finestrini la città lo osserva, se potesse se lo divorerebbe. pidocchi morte, aborti, madri che muoiono, statue che si muovono, cimiteri come chiese, adepti di un mondo senza malattie, senza sofferenza senza cancro senza dolore. 900 pagine realisticamente allucinanti. Bucarest che diventa l'agnello sacrificale di tutto il mondo... scappare da una città che è un intero solenoide e da una collina assistere alla distruzione della città con una punta di speranza avendo fatto del mondo non più Bucarest ma la propria famiglia... "prenditi la città, fanne quello che vuoi, ammazza pure tutti i suoi abitanti ma risparmia mia moglie e mia figlia"

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update : Now longlisted for International Booker Prize 2025 - Congratulations to Mircea Cărtărescu, the first Romanian author longlisted for the International Booker.

I meant to reread this, but it is harder to revisit books so lengthy. Maybe this nomination will give me the ambition to accomplish that. I was disappointed by the last part when I originally read it, but surprisingly, after a little time and distance, I couldn't stop admiring its ambitions.


My original review ( in romanian) :


M-am trezit la ultimele 100 de pagini ca încep sa citesc pe diagonala. Ceea ce înseamnă că pentru mine, intr-un final, a fost un eșec. Mircea Cartarescu a vrut sa scrie o carte mare și a scris-o. Are 800 de pagini. :)) Are părți cu adevărat deosebite. De exemplu, as reciti cu placere biografiile imaginate? de autor pentru cei doi Nicolae, dar ca un întreg nu mi se pare ca funcționează.

[Katia N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Update 2: It has been apparently long-listed on the Booker International 2025. I think it has got a solid chance to win, sadly:-) If it does, I will then really write a big and not very congratulatory review:-) This exhausting and mediocre book with a lot of superfluous intertextuality, an occasional sparkle of surreal imaginary and moments of literal and figurative navel-gazing seem to make people who read it very pleased with their intellectual taste which I always find a bit trying. Having said that, if the prize would finally lead to the translation of the two remaining parts of his Orbitor, I would be happier overall.

Update: apparently it has won Dublin award and will be published in the U.K. very soon. I feel I will have to write a proper review at the end. It seems to be getting a lot of praise. But on this one, I seem to be a contrarian:-). I was underwhelmed.

I loved his “Blinding”. I still regret that only the first third was translated into English so I would not be able to read the whole book anytime soon. But this, in my view, is the paler, less inventive meditation on the same themes. Surreal, sometimes beautifully so; baroque, excessive but repetitive in some parts. Derivative in others. It is also full of pathos and Existentialism on the level of a teenager: would you safe a masterpiece or a child from a burning building? The question is helpfully answered for us not to despair, but it takes 800 pages. And the endless sequences of dreams that seemed to be taken verbatim from the author’s older diaries were as tiresome as they usually are in the novels: revelatory only to the dreamer.

This novel (though the narrator prefers to call it anti-novel) has been highly praised by others and I might write something more in depth to show more nuanced opinion. There were many elements I enjoyed. But for now I am glad to “escape” not unlike the narrator of the novel constantly searching for “escape” routes. I agree it might be easier in my case.

The translation is superb though.

[Juan Nalerio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cuando llegué a la última frase, respiré hondo y di gracias por terminarlo. Fueron casi 50 días de lectura ardua y complicada, al mismo tiempo bella y disfrutable.

Quería sacármelo de la cabeza, y al mismo tiempo que hubieran más capítulos.

Me cuesta clasificar a Solenoide. Es una obra que mezcla lo fantástico con lo real. Es también un tratado de reflexiones metafísicas; hay poesía y se expresan emociones y sentimientos profundos.

Asistimos a episodios de la vida diaria de un profesor rumano en una Bucarest cenicienta, monótona, aburrida, deteriorada por el sistema comunista de los 70´s. De pronto el autor nos interna en los sueños del protagonista y en episodios que escapan a toda lógica. Se mezcla el tiempo y la realidad desaparece. Desfilan personas reales y situaciones ficticias, libros y autores.

La idea central que ronda al profesor-escritor es el escape, la huida. Salirse de su cuerpo, irse del mundo. Este es un libro muy terrenal, hay continuas referencias a fluídos, vísceras, huesos, putrefacciones y ácaros.

¿Entendí lo que Cartarescu propone? Seguramente no. El libro viene con un posfacio en donde se dice que Solenoide es un compendio de toda la obra del autor y contiene múltiples referencias a sus libros anteriores.

Quedé contento, tengo mucha literatura de la buena por delante.

[Andrei Florian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introspectia sufletului uman disecat in particulele lui componente. Asa am perceput eu Solenoid.

[Laura Gotti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capolavoro monumentale contemporaneo, astenersi chi non ha tempo, testa o voglia di imbarcarsi in un giro di pensieri, riflessioni, paranoie, fantasie, sogni che a, volte, scoraggia ma che ripaga sempre in maniera sensazionale. Mai letto niente di simile e sono molto lieta di averlo fatto.

Ci ho messo due mesi, in mezzo un trasloco, l'arrivo di una gattina di due mesi, un serie di problemi tecnici e l'estate, l'infamissima estate. Spesso è rimasto sul comodino a guardarmi e io colpevole di darmi a roba più lieve, ma spesso è stato compagno di ore indescrivibili.

Di cosa parla? Boh. Di tutto? Dopo una cinquantina di pagine in cui sono stata sul punto di mollarlo almeno dieci volte - me ne aspettavano circa un migliaio, ce l'avrei fatta? - trovo a pag. 108
'Guai a noi, forse, se siamo giunti all'ultimo battito senza aver capito nulla dell'immenso puzzle in cui viviamo'
e non mi fermo più fino alla fine, dove non posso fare a meno di pensare che è un libro che resterà con me a lungo, come i classici ma con tutt'altro respiro.

Birra ghiacciata, come quasi tutta l'estate che spero finisca a breve.

[Jorge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literatura en estado químico puro para ser metabolizada por todo tipo de lectores. Una obra fascinante, magma salido de un volcán en plena erupción. Un libro para toda la vida y para todos, esto a pesar de lo que se dice acerca de que no todos los libros son para todos los lectores.

El libro está dividido en 4 partes que a su vez comprenden 51 capítulos en sus casi 800 páginas. La narración no es lineal, sino que va y viene en el tiempo, tanto cuando el autor aborda sus recuerdos, como cuando se instala en su vida reciente. El protagonista, un escritor frustrado que termina dando clases de Literatura, es una alter ego del autor rumano Mircea Cartarescu (1956).

Libro inclasificable. No es una novela, no es una ficción, no es un libro de recuerdos o un ensayo: se trata del diario de un iluminado o de una especie de memorias oceánicas del espíritu de un demiurgo, mediante el cual el autor trata de explicarse la realidad y el sentido de la vida.
¿De qué trata este libro? La obra tiene un poco o un mucho de todo, principalmente trata del mundo interior del escritor, quien quiera que sea éste, ya que su personalidad se desdobla en dos seres; trata de su convivencia con su terrorífico y solitario entorno y trata de su relación hermosa y plena con la literatura a través de la cual concibe, capta y vive el mundo, más que a través de sus sentidos. Todo esto lo despliega maravillosamente y lo sabe mezclar con buenas dosis de ficción la cual es insertada en la más pura realidad.

El autor nos da un paseo por las matemáticas, por la geometría espacial, por la biología, por la anatomía humana, por la poesía, por la metafísica y por muchos otros temas, todo impregnado por la soledad, por la sinrazón de la vida y por su visión de lo que es la realidad. Su prosa es multicolor, multidimensional y alucinante, derrochando una gran variedad de recursos, en especial un léxico que abarca todos los ámbitos del conocimiento.

Podemos decir que el mundo interior del personaje es una fantasmagoría y el mundo exterior es un conjunto de ruinas. Cartarescu concibe la realidad como fantástica y la fantasía como algo real.

Sin duda con esta obra el autor se consagra como un genio incontestable, como un artista profético, como uno de los escritores vivos de mayor importancia, explorando nuevos caminos en la literatura, rompiendo barreras y haciendo literatura del siglo XXI. A través del libro el autor nos asegura que él escribe para sí mismo, para explicarse su existencia y su mundo. Ese es el gran secreto de una literatura honesta y franca. Su prosa por momentos sublima nuestro espíritu y también nuestro intelecto al cual lanza un reto con sus inmensos conocimientos y sus disquisiciones y planteamientos que construye a la vez de manera intrincada y concienzuda sobre una gran variedad de temas.

Sorprenden los ilimitados recursos realistas-líricos-fantásticos-metafísicos de los que hace gala el escritor tanto para describirnos con ensimismada obsesión sus estados interiores, su visión del mundo, de la vida, de la muerte, de las razones para vivir, el destino humano, la resistencia a la muerte, el sufrimiento al que todos estamos destinados y la soledad abismal que nos invade. Todo esto atravesado siempre a lo largo de la obra por un ansia de trascender a nuestra limitada condición humana.

En cuanto a sus memorias, éstas las plasma con minuciosidad y nos conduce a través de su niñez, a su humilde niñez de cuando tenía 4 o 5 años, contándonos sus recuerdos con prolijidad y pulcritud, como si eso que nos cuenta le hubiese sucedido ayer. A este respecto, todos tenemos recuerdos muy lejanos atesorados en nuestro cerebro, pero no estoy cierto de qué tan reales sean éstos o con qué tanta fidelidad los conservamos y los externamos, por eso se dice que al final, nuestras vidas no son como las vivimos sino como las recordamos.

Bucarest es otro gran tema en el libro. La describe de mil maneras, nos hace llegar hasta sus calles, a sus plazas, a sus ruinosos edificios, a las deterioradas construcciones industriales, a la pobreza de sus habitantes, a la opresiva atmósfera que se respira “en la ciudad más fea sobre la faz de la tierra”; una Bucarest en la época del férreo y sombrío régimen comunista.

Además de pasearnos por los temas comentados, mención aparte merece su veneración por algunos escritores entre los que destacan Kafka, Pynchon, Borges, Nabokov, Dostoievski y muchos más.

Como se dijo el argumento que guía incesantemente esta obra de Cartarescu es su obsesión por trascender de nuestra condición humana, la cual se encuentra limitada por cinco sentidos y tres dimensiones y él desarrolla, de manera alucinante y en términos que desbordan el plano literario, alternativas para una encontrar una abertura hacia la huida de esta condición que alivie nuestras carencias, sufrimientos y desesperanzas.

Acerca de la búsqueda de la cuarta dimensión, el escritor sigue un hilo conductor que se inicia con la lectura de la novela “El Tábano” de Ethel Voynich y a partir de ahí la casualidad lo lleva a desmadejar una cautivadora serie de hechos.
De alguna manera cae en sus manos y en su intelecto el famoso “Manuscrito Voynich”, que el autor toca en varios capítulos y que se interioriza con otros temas en la vida del protagonista. Alrededor de este manuscrito orbitan hechos y personajes que forman un entramado por demás fascinante y que son desarrollados como sólo Cartarescu podría hacerlo. Los personajes a destacar en esta madeja son: Wilfrid Michael Voynich (1865-1930), bibliófilo lituano y quien fue uno de los propietarios del famoso manuscrito, incluso también es considerado como el presunto autor de éste; Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907), matemático inglés quien nos descubrió la cuarta dimensión entre otras cosas; George Boole (1815-1864), matemático y lógico británico considerado como uno de los fundadores de las ciencias de la computación y Ethel Lilian Voynich (1864-1960), hija de George Boole y quien fue novelista y promotora de causas revolucionarias. Estos personajes y su pensamiento se encuentran asombrosamente relacionados entre ellos y de alguna manera ejercen un influjo especial sobre la obra del autor.

Concluyendo la lectura de este meteorito literario que me ha desbordado, ahora pienso que todo ese tiempo que ha transcurrido desde su inicio hasta su conclusión (casi dos meses) he estado en una especie de narcosis, ha sido una fantasmagoría verídica que ha modificado y ampliado mis horizontes de la realidad.

Por último, no podría dejar de mencionar el espléndido trabajo de traducción del Rumano al Español, efectuado por la gran traductora española Marian Ochoa de Eribe (1964) quien pareciera vivir bajo la piel del autor rumano. Su traducción parece desprender toda la fidelidad del manuscrito original, conservando todos o casi todos los méritos de su original.

En algunas partes del libro mi capacidad de comprensión e interpretación se ha visto rebasada, pero al leer el magnífico Posfacio del escritor Rumano Marius Chivu (1978), todas mis dudas e inquietudes se han aclarado de una manera increíble. Un reconocimiento a este escritor por su capacidad de interpretación y de comunicación para algunos despistados como yo.

Un siglo sucede a otro y de alguna manera podemos decir que el siglo XXI es hijo del siglo XX, y el XX lo fue del XIX. Cada siglo desarrolla sus ideas, su arte, su música, sus formas de gobierno, sus inventos, su concepto del ser humano y su literatura; y esas ideas, arte, música, formas de gobierno, son hijas de las anteriores que de alguna manera las procrearon. Así tenemos que, por ejemplo, Beethoven (1770-1827) no hubiese escrito su música tal y como la escribió si no hubiesen existido antes la ideas musicales de Bach (1685-1750) o de Mozart (1756-1791); Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) no hubiese escrito sus sinfonías sin haber escuchado antes a ese coloso llamado Beethoven o los desarrollos musicales de su espíritu tutorial llamado Richard Wagner (1813-1883); o bien Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) no hubiera elaborado sus teorías acerca de los agujeros negros o no hubiera podido encaminarse hacia sus aportaciones a la astrofísica, si antes no hubiese existido Newton (1642-1727) quien arrojó luz sobre el camino de Hawking.

Las torrenciales aguas de la literatura han seguido incesantes su devenir a través de sus cauces naturales que se van renovando perpetuamente y cada vez encuentran un nuevo lecho por el cual discurrir. Para llegar a la literatura del siglo XXI, necesariamente hubo que pasar por un proceso de siglos que involucró a grandes y diversos talentos, desarrollos literarios propios e ideas centenarias que han abierto periódicamente cauces nuevos. Así tenemos que el siglo XIX nos regaló grandiosos claroscuros, recreó para nosotros el día y la noche y nos las regaló en sus páginas llenas de pasión y en las cuales plasmó grandes epopeyas del intelecto y del espíritu humano.

El siglo XX nos arrojó un amasijo multicolor del cual aún nos llegan sus osados destellos y sus poderosas vibraciones, así como sus relampagueantes colores en toda su gama y magnitud. No hay que imaginar esta intensidad de colores puesto que se encuentran ahí, en las páginas que salieron del siglo XX y éstas continúan hechizando y deslumbrando al lector. Ahora las visionarias y oníricas aguas de la literatura, impulsadas conjuntamente por Mircea Cartarescu y por las Oceánidas, han llegado hasta nosotros, hasta estos tiempos, conducidas por formidables torrentes que se han nutrido por siglos, en su curso natural, por la corriente principal y por sus afluentes y que ahora deja atrás, encontrando ya en la primerísima parte de este siglo XXI un propio e inmenso lecho por el cual discurrir. Bienvenidos a la era Solenoide.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the International Dublin Literary Award 2024
Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize

I don't believe in books - I believe in pages, in phrases, in lines.

Solenoid is Sean Cotter’s magnificent translation of Mircea Cărtărescu 2015 novel of the same name, an impressive novel as attested to by its prize success.

The novel has many strands but the highlights for me were:

- the aphorisms and parables, inspired by Kafka (see below) and Borges;
- the portrayal of (Communist era) Bucharest which for the narrator is both the centre of the universe (he argues that the existence of other cities may simply be fables as far as his own experience goes) and the one city he claims was designed and built already in a state of decay;
- the remarkable story of the family of George Boole, the creator of Boolean algebra), which includes Mary Everest Boole, niece of George Everest, after whom the mountain is named); his daughter Ethan Lilian Voynich (author of the book, which, unknown to her, was read in millions of copies in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and married to the antiquarian book dealer from which the Voynich Manuscript takes its name); Boole’s son-in-law, married to another daughter, Charles Howard Linton, inventor of the tesseract and whose son was to invent the Jungle Gym, and granddaughter one of the few women at the Manhattan Project.

I can give a deposition on my first memories, about the brother missing from them, about the moment in which my mother left me in the unlocatable hospital where I woke on an operating table, under the stars. I can talk about my incomprehensible feeling of predestination. About doctors and dentists who tortured me throughout my childhood. About the book I literally bathed in tears when I was twelve, even though I understood absolutely nothing from it: The Gadfly by Ethel Lilian Voynich. About the way I rediscovered the novel with Carbonari and Freudian conflicts much later, in the Department of Letters library. About how amazed I was when Goia told me the story of the Boole family and the mathematician's five prodigious daughters, about the chaos that the amoral, young genius, a friend of Lewis Carroll, produced in this family, unraveling its logico-mathematic geometry, exploding its Victorian principles, and infusing their thoughts with the telescopic insanity of the fourth dimension: worlds within worlds, in the depths and heights arranged in an asymptotic spiral of grandeur that the poor ganglion imprisoned in our skulls cannot comprehend. How can you not think that the series Gadfly-Boole-Hinton is a sign, a model trajectory, a map for your great escape plan? And how can you ascribe to chance the fact that Ethel eventually married the one found, after a rocambolesque, six-century adventure, by the manuscript that today bears his name: the incomprehensible, monstrous Voynich manuscript? And why are the manuscript's fat women—naked, with their pink nipples and curly hair, bathing in communicating bathtubs in a bizarre system of pipes—identical to those in Bucharest's underground passages, on the trajectory of the Floreasca militia station-the block on Stefan cel Mare- the Masina de Paine Clinic? And why, again, are Nicolae Minovici’s visions, from his controlled auto-hangings, performed over the course of decades in one of the wings of the morgue (scientific ardor? morose hedonism?) so similar to the cabalistic circles painted on the pages of the Voynich manuscript?

That said it is a flawed masterpiece.

Most notably it is simply too long - there are parts that would have been better cut, most notably the passages of recorded dreams from the narrator’s earlier notebooks, which added little to the text, particularly given the “real”-world of the novel already crosses, very effectively, into a Dantean dreamscape. And, the fact that, while filling 7 pages with “Help!” printed 3105 times (yes I counted) isn’t quite at Ducks Newburyport levels of tedious padding, it still is a waste of ink and paper.

On which topic, it seems Snoopy had the idea first:



The length is particularly striking given that the narrator of the novel sets out his manifesto for writing, using Kafka’s notebooks as an example of how it should be done:

”The master of dreams, the great Issachar, sat in front of the mirror, his spine against its surface, his head hanging far back, sunk deep into the mirror. Then Hermana appeared, master of the twilight, and she melted into Issachar's chest, until she completely disappeared." I have often wondered about the source of my aversion to the novel, why I would have looked down on myself if I had written novels, "books about," endless stories, why it is I hate Scheherazade and all her children who labor to produce narrations so we can learn morals or wile our lazy hours. Why I never wanted to write from pleasure or for pleasure. Why I don't want to draw monumental gates, or even little cat doors, on the walls of literature. Why I define myself by my illnesses and insanities, not through my books. Why I am so resentful that I was kicked out of literature. This fragment from Kafka answers all. You will not find sentences like this one in any book, because not even Kafka dared to transform them into the tiny ear bones of any narrative. They were left in the obscure pages of his journal, destined for the flames, pages that did not delectate and did not instruct, pages that did not exist but were more meaningful than all those that have ever existed. You don't need a thousand pages for a psychodrama, just five lines about Issachar and Hermana.

And women in the novel seem to exist primarily as sexual objects and there are other problematic aspects from a diversity perspective (the end of the first passage quoted above is typical). It reads like a novel translated from the 1970s or perhaps 1980s, but I was surprised to see the original was actually published in 2015, although I think the novel itself is set in that earlier era (the narrator, like the author, was born in the mid 1950s).

While a satisfyingly challenging read, this is a more accessible introduction to the author’s work than the hallucinatory Orbitor trilogy, of which only the first part, Blinding, has been translated into English, also by Cotter. However my favourite of his translated works to date remains Nostalgia and he is an author that I think works better as novella than at tome length.

Highly worthwhile and a strong International Booker contender I suspect. [as it indeed proved!]

The judges' take

Solenoid is uncategorisable epic of interconnected realities, a book that seems to be about… everything. On a single page you might be flung from intimate insights into the banality of a teacher’s life to grand theoretical re-imaginings of the universe, to microscopic insights into mites, matter, love or letter-forms. It’s a mind-boggling, bravura and ceaselessly entertaining book, unlike anything else. The translation struck us as word perfect, a feat of attention to detail that transports us with total control from Communist Romania to the far sci-fi reaches of the imagination and back again.

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it in the winter, at the start of the year, when one should be reading something luminous. For the first few days, I was inebriated — delirious even. What a genius, I thought. What a cathedral of thought.
But genius, like perfume, fades faster than one expects.

Somewhere between the metaphysical insects and the endless digressions, my admiration turned into endurance. What began as ecstasy became survival.
By the final pages, the only feeling left was the relief of having completed the ordeal — a calm as cold as the snow outside.

It’s not that it isn’t brilliant — it simply forgets that brilliance must seduce, not suffocate.

[Ms. Smartarse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Translated into English as Solenoid.

A frustrated middle-school teacher lives an unassuming (though not always quiet) life in one of Bucharest's sleazier slums. Armed with an intriguing past that slowly unfolds as the events progress, he proceeds to drag the reader through numerous flashbacks, urban legends and philosophical musings of dubious origin ... presumably in an attempt to unravel whatever point this book is trying to make.



Reading for my book club is often a challenge, albeit one I enjoy tackling as a rule. Unfortunately, every once in a while, the club members will get nostalgic for their school days, and foist some precious modern classic on us to fawn over. I, however, am less enthused by these throwbacks, having escaped lit classes with some serious trauma. And now Solenoid brought it all back.

Suddenly I was studying old literature with inept professors, reading the works of monks and would-be monks, who’d written maybe three lines in Old Church Slavonic, and even those were copied. All because someone had to patch over the giant historical hole of a culture that woke up embarrassingly late.

It's clear from the get-go that this novel is keen to transcend the conventional rules of enjoyment. So much so that it literally throws every trick from the playbook at the reader: unintelligible metaphysical musings, run-on sentences, horrific graphic descriptions, insane murder threats, and even random tangents.
Case in point: this bizarre threat that comes out of nowhere...

Why didn’t I just ask [my mother] directly what the hell had happened? Why didn’t I just grab her soot‑stained hands across the table and force her to tell me the truth? Why didn’t I demand to suck the milk from her breast under the house’s foundation, pressing the whole house down onto her sagging breast with its unusually large areola, until she finally told me everything?

I imagine the end-goal of all these lengthy passages could have been to impart some sort of mind-blowing revelation. One that would speak directly to people's souls or some other mystical mumbo-jumbo... but I just couldn't get over its inherent pretentiousness.



By the 100th page, I started seriously doubting my resolve to keep going, but I soldiered on... if only to see how far I'd get. Spoiler alert: I dropped it around the 400th page mark, so halfway through. As much as I enjoyed all the gruesome horror stories (no, seriously!), it was ultimately just cheap window dressing.

Score: 2/5 stars

Much like his unnamed protagonist, I suspect that Cartarescu had actually wanted to write a very long poem, but, unlike the protagonist, decided to turn it into a novel instead.

...and since poetry and I just aren't compatible, all this self-inflicted suffering was inevitable. But hey, if lengthy lyrical musings are your jam, don't let me stop you.

-----
Note: quotes are self-translated from Romanian, not taken from the English version.

[Bjorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I finished Solenoid on Sunday.

And it's... definitely what you'd expect of something that Cartarescu considers his masterpiece. He starts from a simple premise: What if the Narrator (who's never explicitly named but shares a birthday and a first work with MC) chickened out after his first poetry reading went disastrously wrong and never pursued a literary career, instead becoming an uninspired teacher at a junior high school on the other side of Bucarest? And also, what if Bucarest was part of some weird experiment by Tesla worshippers who had installed huge Tesla coils (there's the title) under select houses (including, it turns out, the narrator's own) all over Bucarest? Also, if there was a growing underground placard-waving protest movement asking, no, demanding an end to this ridiculous notion of death? Down with death! Down with aging! Down with sickness! Down with this unfair entrapment within flesh machines with clearly defined spatial and temporal limits that we never had any say in designing! Democratize existence! You know that Bill Hicks gag, "If you're so pro-life, don't block abortion clinics - lock arms and block cemeteries." Cartarescu does just that and he makes it work.

Of course nothing's simple in Cartarescu's world, and yet it all feels so effortless, the way he builds this into a four-dimensional tesseract of a novel that makes Against The Day feel linear. He weaves together detailed realistic (if always entrancing) depictions of life under 1980s Ceacescu or in a 1960s TBC ward with pure science fiction, with surreal flights into the stratosphere or the microscopic alongside straightfaced biographies of authors, mathematicians and esoterics who somehow relate to his story, roping in Kafka and Tarkovsky and Mann and Verne and the Voynich manuscript etc, and doing it so seamlessly that you eventually stop trying to fit it all together and just ride the wave wherever he takes you. It's like watching the actual brush strokes of Jackson Pollock rather than the canvas the dead paint splatters on. I mean, he's so full of ideas, and moves so perfectly between them, that it makes just as much sense for him to wonder whether he really had a twin brother who died as an infant, as it does for him to be Fantastic Voyage-d into a mite Messiah so he can tell his fellow mites about the good will of the enormous person they live on.

What gets me is how easily all this could become just an exercise, just empty metaphor. But it never does. I've never been to Bucarest but I feel like I could navigate it from a Cartarescu novel - maybe not the real Bucarest, but it's there, just as real as the Lovecraftian exhibitions he finds under abandoned factories. The story is, in the end, grounded in so much love and anger and fear (he spends ten pages just writing help! help! help!) and humour and strength and imagination that it takes my breath away.

It's so messy and so broken and so horrific and so hopeful.

[Antonio Luis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental. Me ha parecido muy compleja tanto en su contenido como en la forma de introducir muchas de sus ideas a partir de la realidad del narrador, y no me atrevería a recomendársela a nadie. A veces me sobrepasaba; nada que ver con su Theodoros que me llevó en volandas durante su lectura. Solenoide puede ser muy cargante si intentas comprenderlo todo, seguro que he dejado muchas neuronas en esa otra dimensión espacial a la que se accede a través de esta obra/novela/experimento/teseracto.

Su estructura es propia del teseracto, en mi humilde opinión: una figura que trasciende las dimensiones habituales y permite explorar múltiples realidades y posibilidades. Al igual que un teseracto, que puede ser difícil de visualizar en nuestro mundo tridimensional, la narrativa de Cartarescu se despliega en capas complejas, donde los sueños y la realidad se entrelazan, creando un espacio propio donde lo onírico y lo tangible coexisten. Este juego de dimensiones se refleja en la vida del narrador, quien, atrapado en la rutina de su existencia como profesor en Bucarest, busca escapar a través de sus diarios y sus sueños, como si estuviera intentando levitar sobre su propia realidad, similar a cómo el solenoide en su sótano le permite desafiar la gravedad.

El solenoide, en este contexto, simboliza la búsqueda de nuevas dimensiones de experiencia y comprensión. Así como el solenoide en la novela permite al protagonista experimentar una forma de levitación, la escritura de Cartarescu actúa como un medio para elevarse por encima del hastío cotidiano y explorar el enigma de la creación y la identidad. La relación de amor-odio con Bucarest se convierte en un microcosmos de la lucha entre la mediocridad y el genio, un tema que resuena con la idea de dimensiones ocultas en la vida de cada individuo.

Además, la obra de Cartarescu se adentra en el concepto de esa otra dimensión desconocida, no solo en un sentido físico, sino también en la exploración de la memoria y el tiempo. Los recuerdos se reconstruyen y se entrelazan con los sueños, creando un tejido narrativo que desafía la linealidad del tiempo, similar a cómo las dimensiones adicionales del espacio pueden ofrecer nuevas perspectivas sobre la realidad.

Tanto por sus numerosos aspectos filosóficos, literarios y científicos que te hacen pensar sin límite, como por la estética de su narrativa rica y surrealista que te hace levitar mientras lees, me ha parecido una de las grandes obras universales, para no dejar de leer, releer y seguir descubriendo.

Al igual que un teseracto o un solenoide, la novela nos lleva a un viaje a través de dimensiones desconocidas, donde cada página es una nueva oportunidad para levitar sobre lo cotidiano y descubrir lo extraordinario. En Solenoide todo está interconectado como una gran teoría física del universo; los personajes, las referencias, los sueños, las experiencias y percepciones del protagonista, están entrelazadas con su entorno y su propia psique, creando un mundo donde las dimensiones de la experiencia humana se expanden y se distorsionan, lo que puede recordar la idea de múltiples dimensiones en la física, para buscar un sentido en su vida y una comprensión del mundo que desafía la percepción de la realidad a través de su estilo narrativo y sus elementos surrealistas:
Fascinante.

[Emilio Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solenoide es realmente descomunal, es una novela conceptualmente brillante que pretende funcionar como una especie de faro para el lector, y que en el medio cuenta con una vasta variedad de temas e historias que, aunque enlazadas en un punto con la trama general, van apareciendo como retazos independientes; una novela que está plagada de referencias literarias (hay muchos guiños a la obra de Borges), y que tiene dos o tres capítulos realmente geniales, y que tiene a una Bucarest maravillosamente descripta como centro geográfico y casi como un protagonista más. Pero también debo confesar que el viaje a través de las 800 páginas no fue completamente placentero, hubo varios momentos en que me he perdido entre tanto galimatías onírico, demasiado para mi gusto, y es que Cărtărescu cuenta que anota sus sueños desde los 17 años y que en Solenoide transcribió cerca de 40 de ellos, lo cual debe haber sido muy interesante para el autor, pero a mi sus sueños me agotaron.

La prosa de Cărtărescu también es descomunal, riquísima, muy poética y con una gran variedad de recursos que nos dejan metáforas bellísimas y párrafos extraordinarios, pero no hay necesidad de meter el diccionario entero en una sola novela y por momentos me parecía que esa era la consigna. Por otro lado uno también se encuentra sorpresivamente con muchas palabras que están repetidas hasta el cansancio, como el caso de “unánime”, que perdí la cuenta de la cantidad de veces que la usa para adjetivar, puede ser solo un detalle menor, pero esa constante repetición de palabras a mi se me hizo bastante tediosa.

Me hubiera encantado darle 5 estrellas, tranquilamente se las merece, pero para mi queda en 3,5, la hubiera preferido con menos páginas.

No es nada difícil encontrar párrafos magníficos en toda la novela, pero me quedo con estos dos que me parecen clave para entender algo de lo que el autor pretende con la novela y que es lo que puede llegar a esperar uno como lector.

No creo en los libros, creo en las paginas, en las frases, en las lineas. Hay algunas palabras, en algunos libros, así como en un texto codificado enviado al general del campo de batalla; solo algunas que significan algo, mientras las demás, las que las rodean, son solo una cháchara sin sentido.

Un libro tiene que pedirte una respuesta. Si no lo hace, si detienes tu mirada en su superficie ingeniosa, inventiva, tierna, sabia, divertida en lugar de clavarla donde ese libro indica, entonces has leído un libro literario y has dejado escapar una vez mas el sentido de cualquier esfuerzo humano: salir de este mundo.

[SCARABOOKS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Romanzo di un candore spudorato e temerario; di una potenza visionaria cupa, con pochi confronti (e tutti altissimi); scritto con la prosa che forse a qualche fortunato ogni tanto deve essere dettata personalmente dal Dio delle parole.

Leggerlo è di sicuro un’impresa. Per tante ragioni: per la mole; per le altezze vertiginose cui spinge il pensiero del lettore; per le immersioni abissali, oniriche e allucinatorie, a cui lo costringe; per le emozioni a tratti strazianti che gli trasmette; per la tristezza dell’ambientazione in cui lo trascina (“Bucarest è la città più triste del mondo”); soprattutto per la paura ancestrale che tutti ci portiamo dentro per il fatto stesso di vivere e che non vogliamo vedere e che invece ci costringe in ogni pagina a guardare in faccia.

D’altronde, è il prezzo che si paga per accedere alla possibilità di gettare lo sguardo in modo per l’appunto spudorato e temerario dentro e oltre i confini della condizione umana, alle frontiere della riflessione contemporanea sul senso dell’esistere.
Non sono occasioni che capitano spesso.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 5 out of 5]

F. Kafka
H Murakami
R. Musil
Julio Cortazar
JL Borges
Jeff Vandermeer
Brian Evenson (horror)
Jeremy Robert Johnson (bizarro)
Bohumil Hrabal
Bruno Schulz
F. Dostojewski
L-F Celine
Gg Márquez
R. Bolaño
Dante
...op een kwart van het boek ben ik gestopt met noteren aan wie het me onderweg deed denken, want het is bovenal van een andere orde en onvergelijkbaar. Dit betekent niet dat ik deze bergbeklimming van 880 pagina's aan iedereen zou aanraden. Ik heb immers geklauterd, gevloekt, gezwoegd, het bijna opgegeven, maar terugkijkend op de integrale leeservaring voel ik me dankbaar dat ik dit heb mogen ervaren. Dit extreem, duister, intens, megalomaan, menselijk,
buitenaards, buitenissig, uitzinnig fantasierijk, filosofisch, walgelijk, magnetisch enigmatisch, poëtisch monster van een boek.

En als je volhoudt krijg je als beloning de laatste 100 bladzijden waar men nog geen passende termen of superlatieven voor heeft uitgevonden.

Ik meen dat dit een 21e eeuws meesterwerk is.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Deep. Vellum. Press. Says. "Sean Cotter is starting work on the 900-page translation from the Romanian & we plan to publish this all-timer in 2022 (!) !!!" I may be able to forego the German trans.



_____________
My latest thing. Collecting novels translated into German. Novels that will never be translated into English. But even if they were I wouldn't be able to read them. So, someone let me know when someone in the Usofa is selling this one? It looks like a beautiful book=object.


______
de(UN) Trans LATE Pleeazey ::
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...
QUOTE
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that there will be an English translation any time soon
– indirect evidence of that is the fact that the English translation of Cărtărescu’s
acclaimed trilogy Orbitor
ground to a halt
after only the first volume
came out in English as Blinding back in 2013
So, if you can read Spanish or Catalan,
or any other European language
in which the book will appear within the next few years,
I recommend getting this novel and
plunging right into it:
it is one of those awe-inspiring literary juggernauts
which grace exacting readership only once in a decade. [my bold]
...
I will allow myself to be outrageously opinionated and blunt: Solenoid is the greatest surrealist novel ever written.
...
Here is the most advanced stage of this century-long development:
a surrealist novel,
which is also a maximalist novel
whose encyclopedic penchant
for exploring various realms of human knowledge
is only matched by its savage commitment
to bending
, exploding and
metamorphosing the “reality” it depicts.
...
Solenoid is also one of
the four great novels of the 21st century
exploring the theme of the fourth dimension,
the other three being
Miquel de Palol’s El Troiacord [wtf?!]
, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day
, and Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. [whadda LIST!]
...
That being said, Solenoid is far from perfect. [cool]
It hasn’t avoided the usual pitfalls
of ambitious long novels
: the book may feel repetitive, turgid and navel-gazing at times. [criteria for FAT]
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
What sacrifice has he offered to write such an extraordinary novel?
I pray to God we’ll never learn.
END QUOTE

[Pavel Nedelcu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nimic nou pe cerul cărtărescian.

O bobină roșie de cupru poate fi ușor adăugată la celelalte elemente alcătuind constelația romanelor sale.

Solenoidul poate fi văzut în moduri diferite: un simbol, un portal spre o altă lume sau pur și simplu spre dimensiunea onirică, este totul și, în același timp, nimic, îl vedem, dar rămâne ascuns sub fundațiile Bucureștiului.

Același stil de a conduce narațiunea pe două planuri, real și oniric, care se îmbină magistral până la întrepătrundere și un final apocaliptic, desprins parcă din descrierea sfârșitului lumii a lui Ioan Teologul.