Solenoid 

By Mircea Cărtărescu 

Translated by Sean Cotter

First published in Romania in 2015

This first paperback edition published in 2022 by Deep Vellum

Finding new authors or books that blow your mind is one of the great joys of reading and what keeps me coming back year after year, always searching for that feeling. This is one of those books, and there is some intangible quality to the writing that pulled me in immediately. There are also a ton of little lines thrown in that I very much relate to, such as “This is what my life is like, how it has always seemed: the singular, uniform, and tangible world on one side of the coin, and the secret, private, phantasmagoric world of my mind’s dreams on the other side. Neither is complete and true without the other.” (71), so that the book feels almost like it was written for me. And what more could anyone ask for? Well, let's dive into the narrative and see what’s on offer. 

In part one the narrator recounts his struggle to write anything at all. It’s about his day job as a teacher in a small town in Bucharest. He tells of the day-to-day activities of the school, the various teachers and gives a detailed description of where he lives: a wondrous house built on top of a giant solenoid that an old man had built in the ground for a purpose largely unknown (turns out, pushing a button above his bed allows him to float in mid air, even allowing him and a partner to have zero-gravityesque sex); “The old man seemed delirious, but I knew better than anyone that delirium is not the detritus of reality but a part of reality itself, sometimes the most precious part.” (63) This line captures so much of what the book is about and continues to take on meaning as the narrative grows. 

He goes on to explore the ruins of a nearby factory with another teacher because kids have been said to hang out and smoke or cause trouble. Inside they find a grotesque display of giant alien creatures, turning the whole episode into a Lovecraftian/non-euclidean episode of Night at the Museum. This is followed by descriptions of his experiences as a child, the formation of his first memories, his realization that adults, parents even, lie, and that everyone is going to die (the ultimate realization that drives his obsessive need to make sense of the chaos of the world). 

In part two, he talks about his visits to dentists and doctors, visits that fill him with fear and dread (something I can relate to all too well), as he learns that he has tuberculosis and must go to a separate school for sick children. He also describes his adventures with the Picketists and their protest against death (a group who becomes a center point of the book). Then he starts laying out remembrances of dreams, things that he’d written in a journal. They center on how other spectral people/beings visit him in his lucid night terrors. He declares himself a medium and wrestles with existential implications: “That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hands, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it will flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.” (311) 

It is this second part of the book that I struggled a bit, finding descriptions of the narrator’s dreams and visions tedious, as they all blend together, almost-certainly intentional, as they sign-post that Weird Stuff is Happening (of course, my understanding of their purpose would change as I continued on and this is a minor complaint to be sure; though, while we’re here there are typos on pp 64, 187, and 515 and the words heteroclite and suppuration are repeated often enough to seem slightly comical). The recounting of the dreams and their strangeness made me question: Is it the solenoid? Is there something else going on? Is it mental illness/images conjured to process the inherent meaninglessness of the universe? Does it represent the self and the text becoming one, the barriers of reality between the two dissolving into a higher unreality of the imagination? 

In part three, the narrator-as-child sets off to the school for sick children. He then visits an alternate universe and recollects, again, the dreams and visions that have so become a part of his reality. We also learn that there are multiple solenoids built around the city, the central one being the morgue, and now the narrator starts to try to figure out what they’re for. There’s a long section devoted to Vaschide, explaining his theories on dreams and how they interact with and interpret the world. He tells of Vaschide’s experiments, so that this theorizing about the reality of dreams becomes a lens (an “oneiric cartography” (458)) to view the entire work, much like one would have a field day with an ontological look at The Obscene Bird of Night. The last bit of this section describes his marriage and how it fell apart, how his wife became unrecognizable, not outwardly but of some inner force that revealed her transformation, and here is where things start to cinch together, all the musings being pulled into so-called reality through the transformation of those around him. 

In part four, the narrator tells us again of his fear of the stars, of little gifts sent to earth from other-dimensional beings, the Voynich manuscript, and of a closing of a circle of childhood, an opening of a door into further mystery. He returns to the run-down factory, this time alone, and has an Cronenberg-esque experience, seeing giant moth-humans, activating all five solenoid hearts. It’s the birth of consciousness, a thrust into the beyond, a unification of the embryo with life and death, into the formless spaces in between (as above, so below), multiple realities and visions coming to bear in what the surrealist would consider the collective unconscious and a desire to return there, to use it for expression so that all can return: “Art has no meaning if it’s not an escape. If it’s not born of a prisoner’s despair. I can’t respect any art that comforts and relieves, those novels and music and paintings designed to make your prison more bearable…My writing is a reflex of my dignity, it is my need to search for the world promised by my own mind, just as perfume is the promise of the many-layered rose…because art will be belief or will not be at all.” (546-7)

We also get an answer as to the purpose of the solenoids and of suffering. The subsequent adventure provides a resounding answer as to our ability to offer real Truth and Meaning for others, to transcend our skulls/physical limitations and go beyond fear: there is no escape. And even if we could, we’d have to be able to see past the limitations of our dimensional selves which would, in turn, remove the illusion of free will so that all possibilities become one and we become an almost static self, wrapped in all the limitless realities/strings that form existence. But, there is a hopeful undercurrent to the end. With the acceptance of this fate and with the destruction of the work, the burning of the notebooks, of creative expression, of the mind’s endless attempts to understand, we can live a life in the world, supporting those around us who are also all condemned to die, of course, sheltering one another in our own self-made realities. Then again, we are left to wonder if this is just the best possible compromise and as much an opting-out of life as anything else.

Solenoid revels in language and imagination in a way that speaks directly to me, reminding me, at times, of the unhinged-yet-romantic ramblings of Maldoror (even lifting that book’s most famous line on page 379) combined with the mystic puzzles of Borges. It’s filtered through a kind of existential angst ala Charlie Kaufman and/or David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Just take a look at this bit of writing: “There are millions of diseases of the human body, parasites that devour it from inside and outside, suppurating diseases of the skin, intestinal occlusions, lupus, tetanus, leprosy, cholera, plague. Why should we passively put up with them, why would we pass by, pretending not to see them, until we are impacted, as we certainly will be? Our minds suffer, so will our flesh, our skin, our joints. Sores and pus will cover us, phlegm and sweat will drown us, injustice and tyranny will make us bow down, annihilation and impermanence terrify us.” (143) I love that. If you do too, then you’re going to have a hell of a good time with Solenoid, and I highly recommend it. 

Heave Lit Rating: Masterpiece

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