Mircea Cartarescu

Sean Cotter

Solenoid

Maggie

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu is a novel which tells you its intentions right from the outset. Our narrator, a poet turned Romanian teacher, is humiliated when his epic poem is rejected by fellow students in a poetry workshop, and so he therefore turns to write for a greater purpose: to compile all of the most important moments of his life, his dreams and nightmares, the stories behind his childhood effects, his experiences with the paranormal and interdimensional, and his research into the authors, artists, and mathematicians who have also experienced this otherworldliness before him. Indeed, faced with the certainty of death, the fact that our lives, on a cosmic scale, are insignificant and miniscule, our narrator is, in short, looking for a ‘way out’, and believes this way out is through this manuscript (the book we read) which is strictly ‘not a novel’, as though through this act of recollection and compilation he can find the pattern or ‘key’ to escape reality, and be free from pain and fear forever.

A book of considerable modern renown with a certain literary crowd, Solenoid is a 640 page long, maximalist, surrealist piece of work, filled with so many concepts and ideas that describing it is surely impossible, and summarising it for a review is equally terrifying. I’ve therefore limited myself to saying a few things of what I loved about this novel, the things Cărtărescu explored the best and left the largest lasting impression on me. Though it's not a perfect novel for me (possibly due to my limited brainspan), it is very clear that the novel required such meticulous design and genius composition, so much so that I understand why people rate Cărtărescu as one of the best contemporary novelists out there—it is a work of such depth and ambition that is rarely seen in the work of his contemporaries, and I understand it is only one of many of his masterpieces.

As mentioned, Solenoid tells its story through a compilation of experiences throughout the narrator’s life, quite literally from his embryonic stage to the present day, where he now teaches Romanian in a school in Bucharest during the final years of the Ceaușescu regime. The chapters alternate through a few different ‘strands’ of chronology—one telling of his childhood experiences: growing up in his parents house, perilous visits to traumatising nurses and dentists, to a later childhood spent in a stifling and abusive tuberculosis preventorium; another strand, more present, tells of his current life as a Romanian teacher, moving through the impossible, dream-like structures of the school, telling the varied histories of his fellow teacher colleagues, and going on excursions into nightmarish realms whose portals are dotted around structures in the city. A third kind of chapter are these discrete mini-stories, in which a minor character or person from history is written in an almost biographical style, each of these biographies ultimately linking to the narrator’s personal story. Other chapters expand upon the narrator’s journalled nightmares, mostly of ghostly figures haunting him during sleep paralysis, and other chapters still expand on the ‘point’ of the manuscript, the writing to link all these experiences together to find the higher message of the world. 

Cărtărescu’s prose style is visceral and abstract. Focussed on the biological, this book is filled with blood, bone, cerebrospinal and amniotic fluids, flesh, skin, navels, embryos and, of course, insects, arachnids, moths and mites. This is then mixed with improbable architecture—these giant solenoid chambers dotted around Bucharest with massive rings of metal, never ending hallways filled with nonhuman entities, portals to other worlds, microscopic bloodstreams, inexplicable and indescribable nightmares, alien abductions, visualisations of the fourth and higher dimensions. This mixture of gory, base, insectoid biology with improbable, spiritual, dreamscape architecture is often a beautiful headache to read. All is translated wonderfully by Sean Cotter, who never seemed to miss a beat. Metaphor heavy and at points magical realist, the style really fed into the novel’s exploration of metaphysics and the subjective nature of reality, psychology, and memory—and passages will terrify you, make you cringe with pain, or straight up break your mind.

My highlight from the novel was how psychological it was—childhood trauma is described in terrifying detail, and in his adult experiences this trauma resurfaces and (quite literally) shapes the physical geography of Bucharest. The narrator’s childlike solipsism never leaves him—Bucharest is the only thing which exists in the world—dreams are given the same weight as waking life; and objectively impossible structures and situations are never questioned but simply accepted. Our narrator dreams, wakes up, and continues through life as if it were a dream, but this waking dream is tinged with the fatalistic and inevitable resurfacing of childhood trauma. The dentist’s chair, this early source of fear and pain, recurs constantly in the novel, appearing in these interdimensional spaces, almost out of place, constantly reminding us that this nightmare is the narrator’s solely, and the narrator’s ultimate goal of escaping fear, terror, and death, is through what is essentially a metaphorical traversal of childhood trauma. This is. of course, only one of the angles one can approach this book, and my mind is filled with different juggling balls of analysis here—there’s so much to dig into with this novel if one wants to.

My limited criticism of the novel that oftentimes Cărtărescu would include redundant detail, sometimes repeating the same metaphor (how many times did I read the metaphor of the fourth dimension being akin to a drawing of a two-dimensional figure coming out of a page?), or sometimes providing an excess of detail in the nightmare journaling (it’s like a friend telling you about their banal dreams, but multiplied by one thousand). These are minor points, though, and Cărtărescu has a kind of ‘get out of jail’ free card with the whole ‘this is written for the narrator’s self (which is likely Cărtărescu himself) and nobody else.’ But I can only judge a novel by its ability to be read.

Regardless, the totality of the novel presents a very powerful statement on art and artistry. To the narrator, the only thing worth writing is the ‘escape plan’, a highly personalised work, hardly for public consumption, which allows you to ascend out of life and escape its endless torment. But even art is not of the utmost importance in Solenoid—even this is superceded by a close bonding with another person, be it one’s life partner or child, and this too restores order to the world, and makes one forget about the ceaseless toil of finding an exit. As someone who likes to write myself, it’s a beautiful message to take away.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will definitely read his other renowned work, Blinding, in the near future.

shain

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu is a novel which tells you its intentions right from the outset. Our narrator, a poet turned Romanian teacher, is humiliated when his epic poem is rejected by fellow students in a poetry workshop, and so he therefore turns to write for a greater purpose: to compile all of the most important moments of his life, his dreams and nightmares, the stories behind his childhood effects, his experiences with the paranormal and interdimensional, and his research into the authors, artists, and mathematicians who have also experienced this otherworldliness before him. Indeed, faced with the certainty of death, the fact that our lives, on a cosmic scale, are insignificant and miniscule, our narrator is, in short, looking for a ‘way out’, and believes this way out is through this manuscript (the book we read) which is strictly ‘not a novel’, as though through this act of recollection and compilation he can find the pattern or ‘key’ to escape reality, and be free from pain and fear forever.

A book of considerable modern renown with a certain literary crowd, Solenoid is a 640 page long, maximalist, surrealist piece of work, filled with so many concepts and ideas that describing it is surely impossible, and summarising it for a review is equally terrifying. I’ve therefore limited myself to saying a few things of what I loved about this novel, the things Cărtărescu explored the best and left the largest lasting impression on me. Though it's not a perfect novel for me (possibly due to my limited brainspan), it is very clear that the novel required such meticulous design and genius composition, so much so that I understand why people rate Cărtărescu as one of the best contemporary novelists out there—it is a work of such depth and ambition that is rarely seen in the work of his contemporaries, and I understand it is only one of many of his masterpieces.

As mentioned, Solenoid tells its story through a compilation of experiences throughout the narrator’s life, quite literally from his embryonic stage to the present day, where he now teaches Romanian in a school in Bucharest during the final years of the Ceaușescu regime. The chapters alternate through a few different ‘strands’ of chronology—one telling of his childhood experiences: growing up in his parents house, perilous visits to traumatising nurses and dentists, to a later childhood spent in a stifling and abusive tuberculosis preventorium; another strand, more present, tells of his current life as a Romanian teacher, moving through the impossible, dream-like structures of the school, telling the varied histories of his fellow teacher colleagues, and going on excursions into nightmarish realms whose portals are dotted around structures in the city. A third kind of chapter are these discrete mini-stories, in which a minor character or person from history is written in an almost biographical style, each of these biographies ultimately linking to the narrator’s personal story. Other chapters expand upon the narrator’s journalled nightmares, mostly of ghostly figures haunting him during sleep paralysis, and other chapters still expand on the ‘point’ of the manuscript, the writing to link all these experiences together to find the higher message of the world. 

Cărtărescu’s prose style is visceral and abstract. Focussed on the biological, this book is filled with blood, bone, cerebrospinal and amniotic fluids, flesh, skin, navels, embryos and, of course, insects, arachnids, moths and mites. This is then mixed with improbable architecture—these giant solenoid chambers dotted around Bucharest with massive rings of metal, never ending hallways filled with nonhuman entities, portals to other worlds, microscopic bloodstreams, inexplicable and indescribable nightmares, alien abductions, visualisations of the fourth and higher dimensions. This mixture of gory, base, insectoid biology with improbable, spiritual, dreamscape architecture is often a beautiful headache to read. All is translated wonderfully by Sean Cotter, who never seemed to miss a beat. Metaphor heavy and at points magical realist, the style really fed into the novel’s exploration of metaphysics and the subjective nature of reality, psychology, and memory—and passages will terrify you, make you cringe with pain, or straight up break your mind.

My highlight from the novel was how psychological it was—childhood trauma is described in terrifying detail, and in his adult experiences this trauma resurfaces and (quite literally) shapes the physical geography of Bucharest. The narrator’s childlike solipsism never leaves him—Bucharest is the only thing which exists in the world—dreams are given the same weight as waking life; and objectively impossible structures and situations are never questioned but simply accepted. Our narrator dreams, wakes up, and continues through life as if it were a dream, but this waking dream is tinged with the fatalistic and inevitable resurfacing of childhood trauma. The dentist’s chair, this early source of fear and pain, recurs constantly in the novel, appearing in these interdimensional spaces, almost out of place, constantly reminding us that this nightmare is the narrator’s solely, and the narrator’s ultimate goal of escaping fear, terror, and death, is through what is essentially a metaphorical traversal of childhood trauma. This is. of course, only one of the angles one can approach this book, and my mind is filled with different juggling balls of analysis here—there’s so much to dig into with this novel if one wants to.

My limited criticism of the novel that oftentimes Cărtărescu would include redundant detail, sometimes repeating the same metaphor (how many times did I read the metaphor of the fourth dimension being akin to a drawing of a two-dimensional figure coming out of a page?), or sometimes providing an excess of detail in the nightmare journaling (it’s like a friend telling you about their banal dreams, but multiplied by one thousand). These are minor points, though, and Cărtărescu has a kind of ‘get out of jail’ free card with the whole ‘this is written for the narrator’s self (which is likely Cărtărescu himself) and nobody else.’ But I can only judge a novel by its ability to be read.

Regardless, the totality of the novel presents a very powerful statement on art and artistry. To the narrator, the only thing worth writing is the ‘escape plan’, a highly personalised work, hardly for public consumption, which allows you to ascend out of life and escape its endless torment. But even art is not of the utmost importance in Solenoid—even this is superceded by a close bonding with another person, be it one’s life partner or child, and this too restores order to the world, and makes one forget about the ceaseless toil of finding an exit. As someone who likes to write myself, it’s a beautiful message to take away.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will definitely read his other renowned work, Blinding, in the near future.

Rosa

just how I like it — beautifully written, gross, and surreal. Also by far the densest book I’ve ever read, it took me two months to finish

Solenoid

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