Description
By (author) Cartarescu Mircea; Translated by Cotter, Sean
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LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025
WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION
”An instant classic” New York Times
Based on Cartarescu”s own experience as a teacher, Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist”s life and spirals into an existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics. Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, it grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths.
In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.
PRAISE FOR SOLENOID
”Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult” TLS
”A bravura performance” The Nation
”Surreal and viscerally political” FT
”Nothing short of remarkable” Los Angeles Review of Books
”A masterpiece” Astra Magazine
Review quote:
This profoundly surreal book presents an inner life like no other. Solenoid is the bewildering, unclassifiable, barely comprehensible record of a dreamer and a visionary, genius and nutcase, loner and loser, philosopher and pariah – all rolled into one. . . Mircea Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult
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An engrossing study of a cerebral antihero, who longs to escape his earthly existence. . . an instant classic
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A bravura performance: extravagantly brilliant ideas pinwheeling out from the dark center of a scrupulously imagined and death-driven self
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A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written
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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
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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. . . The sheer immensity of Cotter”s undertaking combined with the unfailing evenness of the translation”s quality is nothing short of remarkable
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[An] unsummarisable monster of a book
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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
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An anti-novel that for all intents and purposes should not exist but still does despite itself, thanks to the overpowering talents of the author and the translator
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Presented as the digressive diary of a failed writer teaching at an elementary school in Bucharest, who fantasises about escaping the ugliness of life under communism, this novel by Romania”s best-known contemporary author is by turns mundane and metaphysical, surreal and viscerally political
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Extraordinary and baroq
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