Solenoid

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Description

Based on Cartarescu's own experience as a teacher, Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life and spirals into an existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics. Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, it grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths.In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.

Reviews

'This profoundly surreal book presents an inner life like no other. Solenoid is the bewildering, unclassifiable, barely comprehensible record of a dreamer and a visionary, genius and nutcase, loner and loser, philosopher and pariah - all rolled into one. . . Mircea Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult' - TLS

'An engrossing study of a cerebral antihero, who longs to escape his earthly existence. . . an instant classic' - New York Times

'A bravura performance: extravagantly brilliant ideas pinwheeling out from the dark center of a scrupulously imagined and death-driven self' - The Nation

'A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written' - Kirkus (starred review)

'The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cartarescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical' - Wall Street Journal

Author Bio

Mircea Cartarescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter's English translation.