Solenoid

Starred review from October 10, 2022
Cartarescu (Blinding) weaves a monumental antinovel of metaphysical longing and fabulist constructions. The unnamed narrator has abandoned his youthful aspirations to become a writer, though he zealously maintains a diaristic “report of anomalies.” He languishes in obscurity as an elementary school teacher in Bucharest, which he calls “a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things.” Bookish and febrile, he lives in a boat-shaped house built atop one of the city’s five “solenoids,” torus-shaped metallic structures that tap into the energy of the fourth dimension, as well as providing earthly benefits such as the ability to levitate during sex. The novel shuttles among drily grotesque evocations of the narrator’s life, his phantasmagoric dreams, and his obsessive search—along with a group of anti-death advocates called The Picketists—for a portal through which to escape the terrestrial plane. His search is aided, or frustrated, by baffling signs and visions proliferating across Bucharest, which the narrator struggles to decode and which produce fascinating digressions into the mystical origins of the Rubik’s cube and an “incomprehensible, monstrous” medieval manuscript. Behind the narrator’s torrential output is a deep Kafkaesque desire to solve an impossible puzzle. For the reader, it’s more than a rewarding quest. This scabrous epic thrums with monstrous life.

Starred review from October 15, 2022
A beguiling novel that plunges deep into subterranean conspiracy theories while questioning the nature of reality. "You can't sow the world with dreams, because the world itself was a dream." The 27-year-old protagonist of Romanian novelist Cărtărescu's waking-dream book is a teacher who has a decidedly Dostoyevskian discontentment with the world: He wanted to be a writer, but one particularly sharp-tongued critic, calling a poem of his "a pointless whirlpool of words," stopped his literary career in its tracks. Now, at the beginning of the novel, he finds himself battling the lice that are epidemic among his students. Parasites are much on his mind throughout this sprawling narrative. So, too, is death a constant preoccupation: Why should he, why should anyone, accumulate knowledge and experience only, in the end, to be annihilated? When not pondering the eternal void, the young man is suspended in a kind of nightly dream state courtesy of the titular solenoid that the previous owner of his house, a prot�g� of Nikola Tesla's who spent a long career inventing very strange things, not least of them this particular electromagnetic contraption, left behind, thanks to which, our narrator says, "I always slept aloft, floating between the bed and ceiling, occasionally turning over like a swimmer in a lazy, glittering light." It's not the only solenoid hidden away in the back alleys and tunnels of Bucharest, and one day the city itself will float away. Before then, however, our teacher and his girlfriend, a physics teacher smitten by theosophy, are drawn into the occult world of a group called the Picketists, condemned by the regime but capable of all kinds of mischief, whose members include a surprising number of people who figure in what passes for our teacher's ordinary life. Cărtărescu writes poetically and philosophically ("What visceral and metaphysical mechanism converts the objective into the subjective?"), and while the story doesn't always add up, it's full of arresting images and eldritch twists that would do Umberto Eco proud. A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written.

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