Paperback

Published Nov. 26, 2022 by Deep Vellum.

ISBN:
978-1-64605-202-8
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5 stars (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 …

1 edition

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 …