Solenoid

You might not think you need a 630-page Romanian surrealist novel to take over your life for a month, but I'm here to encourage the incineration of your to-read list in favor of this sui generis trip through the underbelly of 1970s/80s Romania. From the childhood visions of a schoolteacher with a predilection for termites and dreams of revelation, to meandering notes on philosophy, undecipherable manuscripts, and the fourth dimension, this is a visionary novel, both an homage to Kafka and a worthy entry to his sprawling lineage. Recommended By Nadia N., Powells.com

A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Cărtărescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths.

Based on Cărtărescu'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 — the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript— Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

Mircea Cărtărescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter's English translation.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T.O. Bobe's Curl and Nichita Stănescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. His translation of Magda Cârneci's FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021.