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Solenoid Mircea Cartarescu

Solenoid By Mircea Cartarescu

Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu

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Solenoid Summary

Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, Words Without Borders


A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Cartarescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths.

Based on Cartarescu'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 Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript-Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

Solenoid Reviews

Solenoid . . . is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist's cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of Garcia Marquez and Bruno Schulz's labyrinths are all recognizable in Cartarescu's anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel's sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature . . . he also affirms the possibility inherent in the bitter and incomprehensible books he idolizes. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself. -Dustin Illingworth, New York Times


Instead of delivering a sharp, succinct punch, Solenoid goes the way of the oceanic-rejecting brevity because the author, a Romanian Daedalus, is laying the foundation for a narrative labyrinth . . . The writing itself is hypnotic and gorgeously captures the oneiric quality of Cartarescu's Bucharest . . . Cotter's translation is attentive to the efficiency of Cartarescu's ornate but surprisingly approachable prose, gliding from sentence to sentence and calling little attention to itself. The sheer immensity of Cotter's undertaking combined with the unfailing evenness of the translation's quality is nothing short of remarkable. -Ben Hooyman, Los Angeles Review of Books


[S]omething of a masterpiece . . . Solenoid synthesizes and subtly mocks elements of autofiction and history fiction by way of science fiction. The result is unlike any genre in ambition or effect, something else altogether, a self-sufficient style that proudly rejects its less emancipated alternatives...The mesmerizing beauty of creation, of reality giving way to itself: that, above all, lies behind the doors of Solenoid. -Federico Perelmuter, Astra Magazine


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. -Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

About Mircea Cartarescu

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. Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T.O. Bobe's Curl and Nichita Stanescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. His translation of Magda Carneci's FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021.

Additional information

NGR9781646052028
9781646052028
1646052021
Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu
Mircea Cartarescu
New
Paperback
Deep Vellum Publishing
2022-12-08
672
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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Customer Reviews - Solenoid