A review by jpegben
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

4.75

With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in a greenhouse.

Solenoid lives up to every bit of the hype and is probably the best 21st century novel I have read. It's a book in the greatest novelistic European tradition, an erudite, esoteric, ambitious epic which gives you hope that literature is still alive and kicking. In places, it's unvarnished. Some passages are revolting, disturbing, grotesque, bizarre, and hallucinatory. But it's a man confronting the recesses of his psyche, and it contains some of the most charged and harrowing sequences about loneliness, existential angst, and dislocation I have read:
Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not? Why was I given access to logical space and the mathematical structure of the world? Just to lose them when my body is destroyed? Why do I wake up in the night with the thought that I will die, why do I sit up, drenched in sweat, and scream and slap myself and try to suppress the thought that I will disappear for all eternity, that I will never be again, to the end of time? Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade.


Above all though, Solenoid is a book which is consciously about the power of narratives within our lives. The unnamed narrator uses stories as a means to orient himself in a fundamentally unstable world (and fuck, late socialist Romania in all its decaying, dilapidated glory is much closer to fundamentally unstable than most of us have ever experienced). Narratives are a tonic, an opiate, unique means to escape life and make sense of things because "pain is another word for reality". Solenoid is of course pervaded by the sense of intrinsic pessimism and impending apocalypse characteristic of other writers from similar epochs and contexts like Laszlo Krashnahorkai. And it's chillingly relatable. There's something about the sense of doom, about the hyper-subjective nature of Cartarescu's style, about the way reality itself seems to fracture within the text, and the extent to which the social fabric is dissolving and people are easily seduced by dreams of utopian deliverance which speak to our own times. 

This book is so dense and complicated in the best way possible I haven't even come close to fully unpacking it yet, but I know books this good aren't published very often. The excellent Sean Cotter better hurry up and translate the rest of his work because I am very eager to read it.