These diaries-referred to always as a “text,” because “book” implies readers-comprise a loosely woven chain of themes and plot points that could be read as a distant, more playful cousin to the Book of Disquiet, or an updated Tristam Shandy.

Structurally, Solenoid is presented as a group of notebooks written by the nameless narrator (presumably Cărtărescu himself, at least at first). From there, the world only gets wider, and weirder. We are given a half-dozen paragraphs about lice, their eggs and excrement, and the main character’s body, which ultimately give way to a quiet moment in which our narrator sits alone, quite literally gazing at his navel. From the start, the book is tremendously and joyously strange, opening with an assault on the senses and sensibilities that’s as obsessive as Thomas Bernhard, and as scatological as James Joyce. Solenoid offers another entry to the canon of failed writers who are preoccupied with some of the grotesqueries of having to occupy a physical form. Our narrator is somewhat of an archetypal one, familiar to readers of books by, and about, European Men (capital letters). It is a masterpiece in a league of its own.

This swirling existentialism, and Cărtărescu’s baroquely maximalist approach, make Solenoid feel as if it were a book from the nineteenth or twentieth century that has somehow been leaking into the modern world. Solenoid is the real thing-an honest-to-god novel of ideas, concerned with old fashioned, big picture philosophizing. Across its 700 pages, it records a woozy topography of life, death, and literature, cataloging a world that it both intends to depict, and depart. Trying to describe it is difficult, because Solenoid is so dizzying in its execution that it is best understood from within, and anything less than the entire book requires willfully ignoring some of its fractalized genius. Of course, an optical illusion is best seen for oneself, and similarly, to do justice to a book like Solenoid would require a review as long as the novel in question. Like the Penrose Stairs, or other “impossible objects,” it is a challenge to even find an entry point to discuss Solenoid, because, like an optical illusion, it does not abide by the rules of our reality. They are an impossibility-at least within the confines of our world.įinally available in English, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid is a book that might be impossible to discuss without a veritable library of comparisons, because as most reviews of this book have noted, it’s exceedingly difficult to quickly sum up exactly what Cărtărescu has achieved. They are something that the mind can understand, while also recognizing the baseline unreality of the thing. The Penrose Stairs are a famous optical illusion dating back to the 1950s, depicting a square flight of steps that seem to ascend forever around a series of ninety degree turns.

Solenoid mircea cartarescu english