Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (2015)

Book Discussion

Some writers are gifted toward story creation -programming action in poignant sequence. Some are gifted toward scene setting and the description of environment- capturing the poetic sense of physical phenomena. Cărtărescu belongs to a third class of writer who explores abstraction and interiority.

Solenoid is not an abstract novel itself, but its narrator is continuously teased into intense and complicated lines of thought resembling the Charles and Ray Eames short film Powers of Ten in which the scale of the viewer’s field of vision is expanded by continuously dizzying orders of magnitude.

Perception and scale are two conceptual motifs the narrator explores, but other currents and subcurrents overtake the attention point of his thoughts as well: biographical esoterica, the limits of knowledge, the infinitely forking paths of possibilities permutating at every moment, and the fragile constructions of identity that emerge out of the incidental causation of these paths.

In interviews, Cărtărescu claims that he writes two handwritten pages per day without ever taking anything out or adding anything, and with no story in mind. When I first read this claim, I wondered if he was engaging in some self-mythmaking. Some of Solenoid is written in such tedious, granular detail, and with encyclopedic world knowledge, that it makes sense that it would be the product of such a patient and deliberate exercise. On the other hand, some of the stream of consciousness flights of fancy have the quality of an unbroken piece of writing that can only be vomited in one sitting.

Just when the density of Solenoid starts to become insufferable, and you judge the remaining heft of pages against your will for reprieve, Cărtărescu delivers a punchy meta-story or a side plot for a group of characters called Picketists who -with the lean humor of Vonnegut- cut through all obfuscation and devote themselves to the cause of ‘ending suffering’.

If we are sticking to the superficial plot of the novel, Solenoid is about a man disillusioned to the expectations of recognition for his writing and now endeavors to reconcile his long labored-upon autobiographical manuscript -supposedly sans the will or hope for artistic achievement.

All of this sounds like a frame story for the real world Cărtărescu who -if his purported writing process is to be believed- is then essentially recreating the manuscript of his fictional, disillusioned narrator, with the metafictional elements serving the function of freeing either himself or his neurotic protagonist from self-censure. See that’s the kind of annoying book this is.

Little of Cărtărescu’s work has been translated to English to date. If his other work is similar to Solenoid, maybe this isn’t so surprising, as retaining the technical knowledge and dense imagery of this book in translation seems like it would be a gargantuan task.

I’m surprised Cărtărescu is a somewhat prolific writer. This novel has the feel of a decades’ long effort. There is certainly evidence of rare artistic genius in his prose. The brilliance of this book is like a wildfire, overwhelming, confusing, shapeshifting, messy, and both brutish and sophisticated.

I’ll be interested to see if more of his works are translated. He probably deserves some of the popular acclaim of a Pynchon or Bolaño.