I can only offer a roughshod plot summary. The question at the center of this novel could perhaps be formulated thus: what madness lies hidden in the unremarkable?

Solenoid in turn moves past adolescence into adulthood, the horrors of routine, love, and non-exceptionality. The other books in the butterfly-shaped Blinding trilogy center the narrator and the narrator’s father, respectively, though they’ve yet to be translated into English. Blinding centers dreaming and Cârtârescu’s mother, two focal points of the author’s oeuvre. Nostalgia mostly deals with the experience of childhood, though its most famous short story, “The Roulette Player,” takes Russian Roulette towards its Gogolian, carnivalesque extreme. His first story collection, Nostalgia, won a barrage of awards and was published in English by New Directions in 2005 Blinding, the first in a masterful trilogy, came out with Archipelago in 2013, also in Cotter’s tasteful and perceptive translation. Solenoid is fiction about fictionality, which recasts Cârtârescu’s previous work and, from a new blueprint, Frankensteins a world beyond promises of authenticity or haunted fragments of the past.Ĭărtărescu’s fiction has always begun with the events and atmospheres of his life. This isn’t pure fiction - David Shields would throw Reality Hunger, his 2010 manifesto for “reality-based art,” at my head for claiming such a thing exists - but fiction enamored with itself, that recycles its techniques in pursuit of self-emancipation. The result is unlike any genre in ambition or effect, something else altogether, a self-sufficient style that proudly rejects its less emancipated alternatives. Written as the diary of a failed poet turned disillusioned teacher in the eighties in Bucharest, Solenoid synthesizes and subtly mocks elements of autofiction and history fiction (more on this later) by way of science fiction. Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu novel from 2015, newly translated into English by Sean Cotter, is something of a masterpiece. People like me are mostly full of shit, so take the following with a grain of salt. Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter

Solenoid cartarescu recenzie