Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

 


Amazing! Solenoid is surely one of the great works of world literature from our early 21st century. For all the reasons why this is the case, please check out Dustin Illingworth's excellent review in The New York Times along with Sarah Kornfeld's review in The Los Angeles Review. Additionally, Chris Via considers Solenoid among the best books he has ever read, and explains why in his video on Youtube.

As much and at some points even more than the overarching themes and conceptual framework in the novel, I found specific passages and images especially striking. I'd like to devote my review to five among their number taken from the first chapters.

“I can't avoid lice – I teach at a school on the edge of town. Half the kids there have lice, the nurse finds the bugs at the start of the year, during her checkup, when she goes through the kids' hair with the expert motion of a chimpanzee – except she doesn't crush the lice between her teeth, stained with the chitin of previously captured insects. Instead, she recommends the parents apply a cloudy liquid that smells like lye, the same one the teachers use. Within a few days, the entire school stinks of anti-lice solution.”

Reviewers of Solenoid often mention the opening paragraph of the novel, where the unnamed narrator, whom I'll refer to as Mir, declares his struggle with lice. Mir consistently reminds us of the human condition, wherein we are perpetually besieged by insects, microbes, weather, and our fellow humans, as well as other elements in our physical surroundings, all of which can provoke irritation, intense pain, sickness, disease, and at times, even death. What intrigues me here is the nurse's adeptness in combing through the child's hair, reminiscent of a chimpanzee, while the pervasive presence of lice is such that the scent of anti-lice solution fills every corner of the school. Yikes!

“Still wandering, every day in the summer of '75, down the streets and into the houses of that torrid city, which I came to know so well, to know its secrets and turpitudes, its glory and the purity of its soul. Bucharest, as I understood it at the age of nineteen, when I had already read everything, was not like other cities that developed over time, exchanging its huts and warehouses for condominium towers, replacing horse-drawn trams with electric ones. It had appeared all at once, already ruined, shattered, with its facades fallen and its gargoyles' noses chipped, with electric wires hung over the streets in melancholic fixtures, with an imaginatively varied industrial architecture. From the very beginning, the project was to be more human, a more moving city than, for example, a concrete and glass Brasília.”

Every step of our journey through its 639 pages, we are right there with Mir, living in Bucharest during a time when the Romanian capital was under Communist rule. I can assure you that I now feel as if my passport should bear a stamp for Romania—a three-dimensional stamp that, when touched, blossoms into a Borges-like fourth dimension.

“I had read until I was almost blind and almost schizophrenic. My mind had no room left for the blue skies mirrored in the springtime pond, nor for the delicate melancholy of snowflakes sticking to a building plastered in calcio-vecchio. Whenever I opened my mouth, I spoke in quotes from my favorite authors. When I lifted my eyes from the page, in the room steeped in the rosy brown of dusk on Ștefan cel Mare , I saw the walls clearly tattooed with letters: they were poems, on the ceiling, on the mirror, on the leaves of the translucent geraniums vegetating in their pots.”
 

Mir reflects on his obsession with reading. We can luxuriate in the rich poetry of Mircea Cărtărescu's language, a phenomenal achievement considering the author revealed in an interview that he wrote Solenoid line by line without revision or rewriting. As he related, it was as if he was erasing a blank white page, each line a clean sweep, making his first draft his final draft. Oh, what many writers would give to have a fraction of Mircea's talent.

“I had lines written on my fingers and on the heel of my hand, poems inked on my pajamas and sheets. Frightened, I went to the bathroom mirror, where I could see myself completely: I had poems written with a needle on the whites of my eyes and poems scrawled over my forehead. My skin was tattooed in minuscule letters, maniacal, with a legible handwriting. I was blue from head to toe, I stank of ink the way others stink of tobacco. The Fall would be the sponge that sucked up all the ink from the lonely nautilus I was.”

The consequences of Mir's obsession with reading persist. His body, adorned with words, foreshadows the diverse phases of a supercharged, frequently eerie, magical mystery tour we'll encounter throughout Solenoid, including the supernatural and mystical properties of the electromagnetic solenoid coils hidden underground at select spots in Bucharest. Furthermore, The Fall, Mir's poem spanning thirty handwritten pages, plays a pivotal role in the tale.

“As long as I can remember, I have had a strong feeling of predestination. The very act of opening my eyes in the world made me feel like I was chosen – because they weren't a spider's eyes, they weren't the thousands of hexagons of a fly's eye, they weren't the eyes on the tips of a snail's horns; because I didn't come into the world as a bacterium or a myriapod. The enormous ganglion of my brain, I felt, predestined me to an obsessive search for a way out. I understood I must use my brain like an eye, open and observant under the skull's transparent shell, able to see with another kind of sight and to detect fissures and signs, hidden artifacts and obscure connections in this test of intelligence, patience, love, and faith that is this world.”

Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid contains incredible power. Special thanks to Sean Cotter for his stunning translation. I had to read (and listen to the audio book) in small chunks over the course of several months in order to absorb its torrential force. This is a novel that deserves to be more than read. It must be lived.