Solenoid - Outside of a Dog

Paperback

Published Nov. 26, 2022 by Deep Vellum.

ISBN:: 9781646052028

(1 review)

Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history— the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George …

Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history— the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

1 edition

mark reviewed Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

Hypnotic, Epic Account of Despair Laced With Hyperreality

5 stars

I have no idea who suggested this book to me - I must have recommended that my library buy it in ebook format, because they did, and I got an email that it was ready for me to read, without any memory of requesting it. This seems of a piece with the book itself - on the surface, the chronicle of the life of a failed poet and very depressed Romanian teacher in Bucharest, who endlessly reviews his old dreams, his personal failures and his childhood memories, the book opens like a flower full of teeth, from which emerges secret societies, rural testing facilities, mysterious subterranean machines, a hallucinatory museum of titanic dust mites, a fully-realized Klein bottle. At one point there are seven pages of just the word "help!" repeated over and over again. It's an EXPERIENCE, moments of breathtaking prose and philosophy come by the page, and for …

I have no idea who suggested this book to me - I must have recommended that my library buy it in ebook format, because they did, and I got an email that it was ready for me to read, without any memory of requesting it. This seems of a piece with the book itself - on the surface, the chronicle of the life of a failed poet and very depressed Romanian teacher in Bucharest, who endlessly reviews his old dreams, his personal failures and his childhood memories, the book opens like a flower full of teeth, from which emerges secret societies, rural testing facilities, mysterious subterranean machines, a hallucinatory museum of titanic dust mites, a fully-realized Klein bottle. At one point there are seven pages of just the word "help!" repeated over and over again. It's an EXPERIENCE, moments of breathtaking prose and philosophy come by the page, and for a book that is laden with despair the ending - which is truly a surprise - is very... sweet? Charming?

I do have to give a warning - the text is written in the sort of chauvinistic style that you get a lot of the time, there's a lot of writing about human bodies in terms of disgust, and there's two passages of fatphobia that I found fairly rough and couldn't recommend the book without reckoning with. The narrator isn't reliable, etc. etc., and in the midst of the conspiracies and secret societies he imagines one of fat women, who are described in a dehumanizing way. It's two paragraphs, in the late-middle of the book, but still - a bummer.