Mircea Cărtărescu

Phew. My 5th book from the International Booker longlist took some time, and some perseverance. This wandering book that just keeps wandering. Cărtărescu has said in interviews that her writes longhand on paper, and that he doesn't edit. That, as you might expect, has both positive and negative aspects. The positive is that he flows. His prose can wander forever on any topic, but it maintains a natural flow that makes it rewarding and entertaining the follow. He freely will go off on show more tangents, and sometimes, like his exploration of a fourth dimension, can be fascinating. We learn about our narrator and his city of Bucharest as it existed in the 1970's and early 1980's behind the Iron Curtain. The negative, though, is that it goes on and on sometimes without a point. Thinking through the whole text, I'm left wondering whether the points he is going after really needed so many words. To some extent they did, because the length and style is the book. It's a different book without it. But to some extend it didn't, it could have refined and more effective. That is, it's tiresome. It doesn't fully reward the work entailed in becoming that. And finally, there is something missing. It's a book all written in one mindset and arguably there is a limitation there. For a book interested in different dimensions, it leaves vast swaths of human emotional and mental dimensions unexplored. There are whole aspects of empathy, affection, and bonding that simply aren't here, despite this all being kind of a focus. But then there is one more strength. The book takes everything to a long deep train of thought. It's very thorough. I thought of his prose in my mind as taking everything to extremes and then taking these extremes to their full logical conclusions. What really struct me is where a narrator, a schoolteacher of Romanian, explores a derelict factory with nice fellow teacher of math, looking for where kids might be misbehaving. He then goes on an extended description of the magical and fascinating things in this factory, and his emotionally draining awe of it all. Afterwards the teachers report to the principal, and math teacher explains it was a just a derelict factory. That is, all the magical stuff was in our narrator's imagination. At that point I begin to believe all his observations were along the lines of hallucinations. So, you have the story in the text, the math teacher who finds a layout of electrical solenoids connecting through the city of Bucharest, who becomes a mite messiah, preaching and having a Jesus moment with a population of mites, floats two feet over his bed in the air, loses his way in every building, and turns into something like a sperm. And you have a regular schoolteacher with healthy emotionally driven imagination. And, dear reader, you're left to decide what to make of this.

So, I'm not recommending this one. But it is an experience, if you find yourself stumbling in.

2025
https://www.librarything.com/topic/369129#8819312 show less

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 ... intent to unravel the point of this book, I assume.

Reading for my book club is often a challenge, albeit one I've volunteered for. Quite an effort most of the time, but every show more once in a while I stumble on a hidden gem, which makes it all worth it. Well, the monthly discussions are also nice, but ... you get my point. Unfortunately for me, this was not the case with Solenoid.

It's clear from the get-go that this novel is really keen to transcend the conventional rules of enjoyment. So much so that it literally tries to throw everything at the reader: unintelligible metaphysical musings, run-on sentences, horrific graphic descriptions, insane murder threats, and even random tangents.

I imagine the ultimate goal was to impart some sort of mind-blowing revelation that would "speak" directly to people's souls or some other mystical crap, but I just couldn't get over its inherent pretentiousness.

By the 100th page I decided that I was unlikely to find any common ground with this book, but still I soldiered on ... just to see how far I could get. For those curious, I ended up dropping it around the 400th page mark, about half-way through. As much as I enjoyed all the gruesome horror stories, they never amounted to more than cheap window dressing, just shock value.

Score: 2/5 stars

Much like his unnamed protagonist, I suspect that Cartarescu really wanted to write a very long poem, but (unlike the protagonist) decided to turn it into a novel instead, just to be on the safe side. And I just don't do poetry, so ... show less

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 show more 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. show less

An "anti-Kunstlerroman" so performatively telegraphing every one of its' sentiments that it comes across ironic, an irony the book also tries to trick you into finding plausible by way of a faux-Hegelian omnipresence—a desperate cry of the sophomoric "this is book and anti-book"—that it ultimately leaves anyone already familiar with the concepts therein metaphysically deflated. The main motif is a gnostic one, thinly veiled as veils can thin themselves: "Picketists" who protest the flesh show more as prison, yet limpidly, as protestors of social issues would: cosmopolitanizing the true gnostic sentiment, these generic repetitions of lamentation and the problem of evil (stated not as the Nag Hammadi would, where the question is squarely placed on the Split within creation itself) and a cringe-inducingly overstated desire of the author begging you to see his book as the "hypercubic book whose covers gather the hundreds of cubes of its pages", a hyperbolic book that devours all other books by no other merit than it tells you to do so, an idea so empty that it doesn't realize it embodies the exact naivete of the fictional book the author fails to succeed with in story's start—"The Fall"; other motifs include: "the history of Mathematics" a.k.a re-explaining in templated collocations Boole-as-logical-prophet, Hinton's dimensional thought as a spoonfed analogy for anagogy (cart's before the horse here) in the same way Flatland or Sagan or your resident stoner has explained many a time before, and how "Mandelbrotian" his narrator, his book, his mind is, where he just means "fractal"; his writing self-proclaims itself as Kafka's gates, Borges labryinths, Escher's hand drawing itself, inserts a Virgil, namedrops a Klein bottle here, quotes word-for-word "Do Not Go Into That Gentle Night" there . . . convolution apparent at this point must be furthered that this is at no fault of the translator, since these faux pas can somehow be met with a pretty phrasing yet surrounded by platitude at the diegetic and conceptual level, these referents weave a flimsy quilt, none delved at depth or plunged for weight or held with suave or dropped in play and it's made clear this is out of lack of capacity and ability, not artistic choice. A tragic sign of literatures' denouement: the book who wants to escape the prison of its own 2-dimensionality, tricks the literary types fluffed but not nourished on philosophy proper into thinking the book truly a tesseract (have not Joyce, McLuhan, Deleuze, Derrida already written the tesseract non-book, almost exclusively?); the book does not perform what it describes, it simply choreographs for you in clear terms what it wants to do narratively but can't out of its own lack, a convincing facsimile in passing but executed in the conceptual block equivalents of poorly rendered CGI. show less