Mircea Cărtărescu, "Solenoid"

[Betty]

It's a very unusual book that partly describes the main character's work as a school teacher among his colleagues and other periods of his life. He is an intellectual, knowing literature and science; the language and situations can be uninhibited. The idea of the solenoid, what it is, and how it functions in the novel is a subject for more consideration.

[James]

After finishing Solenoid, my first impulse was to say, "What did I just read?" It is an understatement to say that this is a rather strange novel. The author, Mircea Cărtărescu, is the first writer I have read who is an ethnic Romanian translated from Romanian. (I express it that way because I have read some novels by Herta Müller, who is also from Romania, but is ethnic German and writes in German.) He is a self-described modernist writer who is well-known in Romania and becoming better known in the West, and has been rumored to have been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize (we'll know in fifty years, unless he wins it.

As with much modernist fiction, a major theme of the novel is literature itself. Ostensibly, the book is a journal kept by the protagonist, a high-school teacher of Romanian language and literature at a run-down school in Bucharest. (Actually, to believe the novel, all of Bucharest is a ruin and was "designed" from the beginning as a ruin to express the condition of humanity; he describes it repeatedly, almost every time he uses the name, as "the saddest city in the world.") The protagonist was an unsuccessful poet; he rejects literature as "fake doors" painted in the "museum of literature." He claims that his journals are not literature, and that they are intended only for himself; at the end he claims they have been burned. He also describes them as an "anti-book". He uses all the techniques for destroying traditional literature, such as nonlinear order, mixing "reality" with dreams, memories of the past and of the future, hallucinations, automatic writing, and so forth — the reader is not always (read almost never) sure at what level we are at, what is "true" or "real". The novel has been described as surrealism and as "body horror"; it begins with talking about lice in his hair and is obsessed with physical functions and with parasites. There are also allusions to the authors who are associated with modernism, especially Kafka and Borges who are obviously influences on the style and occasionally the content. There are also resemblances to writers he doesn't specifically mention; some of the hallucinogenic episodes could be taken right from Naked Lunch, without the excuse of drugs. He shifts tones without warning, mixing colloquial language with arcane and archaic words and technical jargon of the sciences, sometimes (intentionally, I'm sure) misusing them.

In addition to the literary theme, other themes include the fourth dimension (much about Charles Howard Hinton and his extended family) and relativity of perspectives. Symbols constantly reoccur: dentist's offices and dentist's chairs appear in hallucinations and perhaps in reality, and in his childhood memories — perhaps we can attribute their presence in his hallucinations to a traumatic experience he remembers as a child; insects, especially parasites, appear frequently and in unexpected contexts; shifting rooms and corridors; mysterious tunnels and tubes under the city; and of course there are the solenoids of the title, copper coils with mysterious properties — the man he buys his house from tells him he built the solenoid under the house according to a plan from Tesla, but we are told later that there are many solenoids under the city and that they have always been there.

The protagonist claims that he is different, "chosen", and that he is recording his dreams and experiences as "signs" which he is trying to decipher, to find a meaning for his life, and we follow along with him trying to piece together a meaning from the clues we are given. The book is very long and somewhat repetitious, but I couldn't stop reading it, even after I realized (very soon) that the pieces were never going to fit together in any comprehensible meaning, which is itself the meaning, or perhaps not.