Description

Unanimously regarded by critics as Mircea Carterescu's masterpiece to date, Solenoid is a monumental novel that echoes Pynchon, Borges, Kafka and other great teachers.

Before us is the long diary of a disillusioned writer who tells of his childhood and adolescence in a ghostly and melancholic Bucharest. The unnamed protagonist, a Romanian language teacher at a neighborhood school, with a failed literary career and a profession that doesn't interest him, buys an old ship-shaped house built by the inventor of the solenoid, a giant magnetic coil that lies under the basement. Its gravitational force doesn't pull down, but consistently lifts everything that falls around it - people, objects, even reality itself. The protagonist befriends a schoolteacher who is a member of a mystical sect that protests death with nightly demonstrations in cemeteries, morgues, hospitals, dentists, psychiatries, and other „institutions of pain.“.

Meanwhile, he faces hallucinations that reveal the truth of his existence. In his eyes, every sign, every memory and every dream is part of a puzzle whose solution will provide him with a plan to escape the three-dimensional world in which we are trapped. One allusion to the „other world“ is the tesseract, a four-dimensional figure derived from the spatial movement of the three-dimensional cube.

All of Cartarescu's previous fiction books lead to Solenoid. A work that brings together all the paths, themes and literary obsessions of the brilliant author who gradually became a cult writer. Genius, madness and greatness. „This is Solenoid, the new, mature novel by Mircea Cartrescu, one of the most powerful European writers today.

Real, world-class literature of the highest order.
Alexander Kaman, Die Zeit

„Solenoid is the greatest surrealist novel ever written.
Florent Georges, Le Monde des livre

Hardcover

736 pages