Solenoid

By: Mircea Cărtărescu, Sean Cotter - translator

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

A highly acclaimed master work of fiction from Cartarescu, author of Blinding

Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

©2022 Sean Cotter (P)2023 Tantor

Buyer beware

If you’re into endless paranoia about the human body, horror generally & absurdism a la Kafka going on forever— the books for you.
I was unaware & read reviews that just said Best! Masterpiece!
This book goes along with Romania’s serious history of same period. It is likely most relevant for students of that time/place. This is a gifted author & there are bursts of beautiful prose as well as nods to Gabriel Marquez without the magical, more the daemons.
I’m not squeamish but after 18 hrs am just bored by the body horror, constant referring back to childhood of protagonist & paranormal disquisition.
I hate to leave a bad review but reader deserves knowing what getiinto. I love long books- Underworld by deLillo, Infinite Jest, DFW. Etc. Have to bail in this with 10hrs to go

Best novel I’ve ever read.

This literally masterpiece is the first timeless classic the XXI century has given us. The audiobook version is flawless, great narrator.

Moments of Brilliance

Dancing and lights. Beautiful and brilliant. Some of the brightest flashes of brilliance and introspection. A blending of dream, philosophy, existential and self awareness. Our beautiful irrelevance. How melancholic.

Our Universal Phantasmagoria

Quite simply the greatest reading (listening) experience of my life. Recommended for anyone who truly loves literature.

Believe the hype

Whatever this is, it's the best to ever do it. Incredible novel, translation, and narration.

Amazing!

I’m so happy that I happened on this book. If you like writers like Haruki Murakami you’ll love it. Beautifully woven fantasy and reality, coupled with philosophy. It’s like an amazing dream.

Very well

As I always say, I’d prefer a copy of the text paper copy, but that being said, I am going to first discuss the text, regardless of its format and then secondly I will discuss the audiobook here present on audible.

Oh, I suppose the writing here in is so well done That I can see myself reading and rereading either parts or the whole thing over and over again for a couple of years and probably not completing it in the truest next generation gaming version of the word completion. This is an extremely stellar novel full of not only razor-sharp insights About life specially as an adult but also it is full of beautiful metaphors and well crafted sentences well chosen verbs, and a razor sharp attention to detail. Yes, there’s also only part of the author this poetic sensibility, much like TS Eliot, where in the unexplainable is attempted, where in the fourth dimension is attempted to be illustrated. There’s an element of an attempt to use this medium to transcend to another dimension through the use of the minds and the imagination. The imagery evoked is extremely impressive because the environment created is concrete and hardly will you come across except maybe in Dostoyevsky in ability to not only create, but sustain a singular mood. Nobody asked to tell me that if this punk wear a long long movie, it would no doubt be in black-and-white. I also want to mention that it is not common at all for a contemporary writer, to evoke Dickins, like a Roth author here does. In fact what we have here is at times Dickins squared Dickens meats, Borges meats, HP, Lovecraft, and I have to say I am very intrigued when I find an author that treats where is able to treat the medium differently than what is Carmen sort of like, how her author is able to go up higher and down lower and to take in greater, and to create larger you know I felt that way when I read the infinite just by David Foster Wallace, which, although I think ultimately doesn’t sustain itself or hold up well over it’s 1000 pages I do think that the author Had a mind that was greater and larger than most, if not all contemporary writers.

All I wanna say about the audiobook as object here is that I have no qualms with it whatsoever. The reader, the narrator, the reader narrator, seems to be in step with the narrator in the story seems to embody his voice very well hardly do you see that such a Such a I don’t know what word I’m looking for, but the narrators because now I guess we have two of them right technically three we have the author of the book. We have the narrator inside the book that the author creates, and then we have our narrator here, who is reading the book, but all of these narrators, and they don’t detract from each other at all, and I guess that’s the main point of not reading an audiobook would be to not detract From the texting to sort of like a Chamaeleon, be able to not be as noticed him as it were we don’t want to add our fingerprints to the scene of the crime so to speak. I can’t imagine there is a much better narrator than the fellow who reads this book for us. Also, there is probably another narrator to maybe but as you are probably already aware, the author is Romanian and this book was translated into English not too long ago so the translator is also probably a little bit of a narrator to. I like it when I know a book is translated because it helps me to Think about the text in a way as to search out its essence the part of it that if it got translated 1000 times wouldn’t change and what exactly that is, that’s why they say that art has a soul and especially a story has a soul in the philosophical sense that is the essence of it the unchangeable part of it all the other parts of it can be changed to replaced whatever But I’m glad I came across this book. I’m certainly gonna finish it and like I said, I’m gonna get a hard copy of it and I will probably be reading through it again. It is a book that is very much it feels like the crest of the literary wave that has been building for hundreds of years now Bon appétit and bon voyage.

Bravo!

Bravo to Deep Vellum for publishing the English translation and to Tantor for producing the audiobook. I hope their efforts bring this remarkable book to a wider audience. It is difficult to describe, since it is overflowing with ideas and fantastical episodes. Ostensibly, it is about an alter ego of the author, one who instead of becoming a famous poet and novelist is relegated to obscurity and lives out his days as a Romanian teacher at a school in Bucharest. But there are some very strange things going on in this version of Bucharest. You can see the influence of Bulgakov, Kafka, and Lovecraft, possibly even Lynch and Cronenberg, but the result is sui generis. It is a tantalizing mix of the quotidian and the phantasmagorical. As a listener, I swung from the moving recognition of a particular thought or experience to delightful bewilderment at the outrageous visions and preposterous incidents that make up this novel. It also raises challenging questions about literature and art and what in life is worthwhile. It is full to bursting to the point that an episode (spoiler alert) where the protagonist transfers his consciousness into that of a mite where he becomes a kind of Christ who brings them the truths of their god (the human on whose skin they live) and is martyred, is treated as almost a throw-away subplot when it would have been the entirety of any other book. It would have been impossible for so many disparate elements and ideas (picketers against disease and death, solenoids planted throughout the city that can cause levitation as well as other strange occurrences, the Voynich Manuscript, alternate selves, the life of dreams, the power and purpose of art, living under communist rule in Romania in the sixties and seventies, and much more) to come together into a truly cohesive whole, but the ending does tie enough together and provides a moving conclusion, that to my pleasant surprise I felt that Cărtărescu stuck the landing. If you are feeling adventurous, this novel is well worth your time.

Excessive and unintelligent rambling

When self delusion rambles on and on and on for 34 hours. No way it was bearable to listen for that long. Still, I want my time back, in adition to my credit. It's clear the author craves to hear his own voice but where is the editor??