Preamble
Now I’m not gonna lie to you; I’m struggling to think where to even begin with the novel I’m going to be covering today. Look, I think most people can reflect on their lives and think of at least one (possibly several) moment(s) in their past that they regularly look back on and ruminate to themselves,
“Where would I be if that had gone differently?”
This question - rhetorical as it may be - cuts immediately to the root of many of the anxieties I struggle with personally. This is why the book I want to talk about today is so significant to me, and immediately after reading it became one of my favourite books I’ve read in years; possibly one of my favourite books of all time.
As I’ve said before, superlatives make for weak criticism, but I am undoubtedly going to slip a few into this episode because this book is, to put it as ineloquently as possible, goddamn sublime. The book in question is Solenoid by the Romanian master of surreal introspection, Mircea Cărtărescu, who I’ve already discussed on this channel. While I’m a little reticent to be covering the same author again so soon after putting out an episode on him before, Solenoid is simply too incredible to leave undiscussed. So here we are.
Without further ado, let me welcome you to WASTE Mailing List, Episode 7. Unsurprisingly, I’m your host Seth (@wastemailing / @wastemailinglist)
As a quick note on format, I’d like to remind you that today’s episode will be available in audio-only format on your various podcasting platforms, as well as a text transcript on Substack (which you’re clearly aware of given that you’re reading it at this moment).
Enough dickin’ around, let’s get into it.
The Find
I want to make sure I offer credit to a particular individual who has been instrumental in my discovery of not only Solenoid but also a wealth of other texts that have been recently translated or, more significantly, untranslated into English. That should be your biggest clue.
That person is Andrei (@TheUntranslated), who runs and writes the absolutely incredible blog, The Untranslated. I don’t want to come off as too cloying in my praise, nor do I want to lapse into diluting superlatives, but for my money this is the most significant literary resource available online, rivaled only by The Modern Novel, and Socrates on the Beach.
As the name should imply, Andrei’s blog, “The Untranslated” is devoted to novels that have yet to receive an English adaptation, and remain unread by us anglophone monoglots (myself regretfully included). He provides a rare window through the language barrier as he covers novels written in French, Spanish, Russian, German, etc. For my money, he is the strongest reader in the digital literary community, and I cannot recommend his blog highly enough.
In November of 2017, Andrei wrote an absolutely stunning review of Solenoid on the blog, in which he called it “the greatest surrealist novel ever written”, and “one of the four great novels of the 21st Century to explore the fourth dimension”, rivaled only by Miquel de Palol’s El Troiacord, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, and Alan Moore’s Jerusalem.
Despite the fact that deployments of the terms “surreal” and “fourth dimension” are sufficient enough to gain my interest, any evocation of the name Pynchon will have me immediately running to pick up whatever book to which this author is being compared. In his review, Andrei deconstructs, dissects, and reveals (with incredible erudition, I might add) the seething, beating heart of this novel. And that was before a translation was available in English, which adds to the impressiveness of the undertaking. If you haven’t read the review already, stop what you’re doing and redirect your attention to his piece. I can assure you it will convince you to go out and order this book immediately if you haven’t done so already.
I read it a few years ago with pretty substantial disappointment because at the time of my first reading, I learned that there was no English translation. It had only been adapted into French and Spanish. Being Canadian, I have a loose command of French, but insufficient to read a book as complex and dense as this. I considered sending it to my sister (a fluent French speaker) for an ad-hoc translation but decided to spare her the misery. So I simply had to sit on it and wait.
Then Sean Cotter came to the rescue.
Publication and Translation
Now those of you who have read Cărtărescu’s Blinding (Vol. 1) published by Archipelago Books back in 2013 should be familiar with Cotter's name, as he’s the one who translated that incredible text as well. I previously covered it in Episode 4 of this show, which I’ll link here to keep the SEO Gods happy.
I will admit, I was surprised to see Cotter return to continue translating Cărtărescu’s work, as he’s expressed quite publicly before how much this author’s work demands of its translators. Again, if you want to hear more about his experience translating Blinding, flick over to my previous episode. Suffice it to say, when I heard he would be back with a translation of Solenoid, I knew I had to pick his brain. Through our email correspondence, he was kind enough to give me an overview of how he came to work on this text
“Solenoid – like Blinding, as it happens – was not my idea. I pitch more books than I translate, but I didn’t pitch Cărtărescu. Will Evans, the visionary publisher, came to me. I deflected as long as I could, because I knew how demanding Mircea’s works are, but eventually the challenge was just too tempting. I wanted to do it, and I was pretty sure I could. […] It was the next landmark after Orbitor. While there are other works on the map, not all have the same stature. […] There is lots more to do though. More fiction, more poetry (including The Fall!) essays, diaries, A Guide to Dragons, etc.”
Sean Cotter, personal correspondence, 2022
Reading this, I then bounced back to Will Evans (@willevans) over at Deep Vellum (@DeepVellum) and asked him about how came to Solenoid. I was pleased to hear his discovery of the book mirrored mine quite closely.
“I read Blinding and was obsessed. I then heard about Solenoid from our friends who read Spanish, like Javi who owns the Wild Detectives and Andrei from The Untranslated, whose review corresponded with a time we could dedicate the resources to signing such a major book. So I called Sean and we aligned timing and goals and made the magic happen.”
Will Evans, personal correspondence, 2022
Now, when it comes to Cărtărescu’s work, those of you who have read him before should be patently aware of his virtuosic ability to blend poetic, literary language with dense, scientific terminology. Personally, as someone whose passion is in the arts but whose career is in the hard sciences, I will be the first to say that these two types of writing are often diametrically opposed. One would think a text that seamlessly interweaves styles of antithetical writing would present a particular challenge to the translator. But Cotter didn’t quite think the same way.
Here’s how I positioned the question to him
W.A.S.T.E: “Solenoid is exceedingly introspective and abstract, featuring plenty of baroque biological processes and bodily functions, convoluted meditations of physics and his relationship to physical space, etc. Were there any unique challenges to adapting Solenoid into English, relative to the other text(s) you've translated for Cărtărescu before? There's a heavier focus here on what I might loosely refer to as "geometry", as well as physics, and the fourth dimension, which I can imagine adds an additional layer of complexity to the language (is there even a Romanian word for ‘tesseract’?).”
Cotter: “Strangely, the more scientific a term is, the more likely the translation will already exist. Scientists coin terms and share them across languages; medical terms in Romanian and English are both taken from French and, eventually, Latin. The Romanian word for ‘tesseract’ is ‘teseract,’ because English didn’t have that word until Hinton proposed it.
For me, the challenge of translation usually comes (and I’m grateful to Susan Bernofsky for putting this into words) in ‘the sequence a sentence dispenses information’. Cărtărescu’s sentences are packed full of information, all of which seems important—the motifs of colour pattern, the thickness of a ring, a particular sequence of screams, the sounds of a tram, etc. All of this information travels in astounding currents of energy, which the demands of English disrupt. This style I knew from ‘Orbitor’, so I had practice already and didn’t panic as much.”
Sean Cotter, personal correspondence, 2022
Cotter raised an excellent point here, and one that I think rings immediately true to a reader who is acclimatising themselves to Cărtărescu’s delivery. While I wouldn’t be quick to make trite comparisons to Pynchon, this author does have a predilection for long, rhythmic sentences, connected by multiple independent clauses, which are packed to the brim with metaphysical preoccupations and philosophical allusions. The challenge is not on a word-to-word basis, but on a clause-to-clause basis, ensuring that all the independent thoughts are delivered clearly, without bogging the whole apparatus down in the noise of it.
When I was discussing Sorokin with Max Lawton (@maxdaniellawton) on Episode 5, he referred to an effect that can happen in translation, where you reduce a stew for too long, and it becomes a thick, gummy mass stuck to the bottom of the pot, and all the individual textures are melted away. I think in a lesser set of hands, this is exactly what could’ve happened to Orbitor and even more to Solenoid. But what we have instead is a gorgeous, byzantine funhouse with endless trap doors, trick mirrors, and hallways that lead to everywhere and nowhere at once. This is far and away the best translation I’ve read all year, so my continual thanks to Sean for this outstanding text. And thank you to the incredible team at Deep Vellum for securing the rights to this book and seeing it through to publication.
The Fall
“Golden lyre, pulse your wings until I conclude this song
Hide your horse’s head deep under silence
Golden lyre, pulse your wings until I conclude this song”
- The Fall
I’m not going to dedicate much time in this episode to the life and career of Cărtărescu, as I’ve discussed it (albeit briefly) on Episode 4 of this show, which you can watch in your own time. Generalities aside, there is a significant moment in this author’s life that I didn’t cover previously, which I believe is absolutely essential to know prior to approaching Solenoid. That would be the creation and public reception of his early poem The Fall.
I’ll just add here, that in our correspondence, Cotter mentioned The Fall as a poem he has an interest in translating at some point in the future, so stay vigilant for that one.
Now, full disclosure: I haven’t read The Fall because (as is the case with much of Cărtărescu’s back catalogue) there’s no English translation. If you happen to be proficient in Spanish, you can read it in his translated collection Poesía esencial (or, “Essential Poetry”) published by Impedimenta Poetica in 2021. I have tried my best to unearth details about the content of this poem but for all intents and purposes have come up dry. To any bilingual viewers, please, drop me a line in the comments or one of my various socials; I’d love to hear more about the piece. All I have to go on at this point is the opening lines which I read earlier, a very dodgy translation I did with the use of AI.
What I can tell you, is that Cărtărescu considers this poem a formative text in his creative and artistic development; a fulcrum point from which a nearly 50-year literary career grew. His reference to his performance of the poem in Solenoid reads as follows:
“The Fall the first and only map of my mind, fell the evening of October 24, 1977, at the Workshop of the Moon, which met at that time in the basement of the Department of Letters.” – p. 32
Let’s start with what occurred in reality. This literary focus group - the “Workshop of the Moon” - was a real gathering that Cărtărescu attended in the late ’70s, however it went by the name “Monday Literary Study Circle”, presumably because the workshop occurred on Monday nights. His first reading of The Fall, on October 24th, 1977, was met with universal acclaim on this night, particularly to the literary critic, Professor Nicolae Manolescu. This event was instrumental in the propulsion of Cărtărescu from a relatively unknown Beat poet to a literary superstar in Romania.
So, back to the book at hand. There’s a bit of the plot I want to get into here, but I’m going to save that for the next section. If you were to reduce it down to its inciting incident, the novel Solenoid is essentially a thought experiment, as to where the author’s life may have gone had that reading gone another way. This is exactly what occurs in the novel, particularly in the events of Chapter 5. The narrator who inhabits the book - a character I’ve taken to loosely calling “anti-Mircea” - reads The Fall at the Workshop of the Moon, and it’s met with complete and utter disdain; a catalytic moment of martyrly humiliation. This compels the narrator to swear off his aspirations as a writer and simply continue his humble existence as an elementary school teacher.
“The coin fell on the wrong side, I drew the short straw, and my career as a writer continued, perhaps, within another possible world, wrapped in glory and splendor (but also in conformism, falseness, self-deception, superbia, disappointment), but here all that was left was an unfulfilled promise. I have poisoned my nights, for the seven years since, in a masochistic effort to remember the grimaces, the sounds, the movements of air in that basement room that turned into the tomb of my hopes.”
– p. 37
Whereas this night in reality was the author’s rise to fame, in Solenoid, it is his fall from grace.
This event in the novel appears to me, as the first of the many literary influences we see interpolated throughout the text. This idea - a divergence of possible realities stemming from a single event - immediately called to mind Borges’ immortal short story, The Garden of Forking Paths, included in the collection Ficciones. This is an absolutely essential text to have on every bookshelf. To put some weight behind that statement, I don’t even think that Gravity’s Rainbow needs to be on every shelf. I guarantee you, something you love stems directly from the work he developed in this collection.
Because I can already see this being something of a shotgun blast of an episode, allow me the first of many digressions. If you haven’t read Forking Paths yet, the story (within a series of nested frame narratives) revolves around a professor named Yu Tsun who meets a man named Ts’ui Pen, and discovers his creation of both a novel and a labyrinth. The narrator comes to learn that this novel and labyrinth are one and the same, and what Ts-ui Pen actually created was a story in which every bifurcation point of choice leads to an alternative story altogether. Yet despite the innumerate possible realities that are gestated in The Garden of Forking Paths, all outcomes are of equal possibility and relevance to the “grand narrative”; the “external”, or “Über-viewer”.
I mention this story because this is the first of many metaphysical paradoxes Solenoid trafficks in. It’s a story that is rooted in autobiography but finds various points in the author’s life from which to diverge. The narrative becomes progressively more outlandish and fantastical, until any diegetic grounding we may have as readers is lost entirely, and we’re forced to surrender to the most absurd, horrid, and baroque corners of Cărtărescu’s mind. I don’t think I’m off-base here either. Consider what he has to say about his writing process in this interview with De Reactor, hosted on The Untranslated:
“I write by hand, without any plan, without a synopsis. My way of writing is pure and continuous inspiration. […] On each and every page I have the chance to change everything, to change the meaning and the course of the novel. […] On each and every page you have to decide your book’s trajectory. It’s as if there are crossroads everywhere, all demanding a decision.”
Mircea Cărtărescu, De Reactor (via The Untranslated), 2022
If that isn’t a process of forking paths, I don’t know what is. Without straying too far afield, let’s circle back to that bifurcation point: the failure of his reading of The Fall. This traumatic event lays the emotional foundation upon which the narrator in Solenoid has built his entire worldview. The 600-odd pages that follow are steeped in above all else, a milieu of self-flagellation and melancholy. Gorgeous, transcendental melancholy, but melancholy, nonetheless.
“-after so many years, I take my revenge on the single person who - bound and helpless, a simple, living anatomical specimen, made for torture - has fallen into my hands forever: me, no one but me.” – p. 39
The Exhumed Reality: Taxonomic Considerations
Solenoid presents an interesting challenge with respect to its genre classification. To put it simply and rhetorically… “what is this?”. It’s not really a novel in the conventional sense; it’s not a straightforward biography; nor is it a series of loose aphorisms or diaristic ruminations; it’s none of these, and yet all of these at the same time. It’s got that weird, chemical mixture of highly varied fixations that you can come to expect from a maximalist novel, but there’s still an underlying direction to the whole thing.
A review of the novel on Romanian Literature Now referred to it as a “backwards Bildungsroman” which, while a little off-kilter in its use of the word backwards, is a clever place to start.
Early on in the novel, the narrator, this anti-Mircea, is speaking directly to the page on which he’s writing down his thoughts and experiences, which is in turn, the book that we’re reading. Here he provides what I see, as almost a “mission statement” for the rest of the work to come:
“I want to write a report of my anomalies. In my obscure life, lying outside any version of history, placeable perhaps within the taxonomies of a history of literature, things have happened that do not happen, not in life and not in books. I could write novels about them, but a novel would muddy the facts, would make them ambiguous. I could keep them to myself, as I have until now, and ponder them until my head cracks open every night […]” – p. 70
From where I’m sitting, this passage provides the clearest explanation as to how Cărtărescu plans to approach the metaphysical problem of Solenoid; the form that serves the content, if you will.
Like I said earlier, the inciting incident of the book is the complete revilement of his magnum opus at the time; the failure of his reading of The Fall. What develops out of this occurrence, is a character whose only creative outlet are the journals and notebooks he writes in to escape the mundanity of his day-to-day existence. As is stated directly to the reader, the book we’re reading is basically just those journals verbatim, packaged together into a single text; the manuscript of a failed writer. What you’ll find within it is a hallucinogenic combination of daily happenings, the author’s anxieties and preoccupations, the content of his dreams, and the bizarre, carnivalesque outgrowth of his creative frustrations.
When considering that this is the work of a person who has rejected the life of a writer, it is in one way, a complete abdication of one’s creative development: an anti-Bildungsroman. But, the same is also true, that in his artistic exile, the narrator ends up achieving creative enlightenment, despite his best efforts to avoid it. So, in a way, it is a Bildungroman… by way of literary asceticism; he just enters via the backdoor. Hmmmm, maybe “backwards” is the right word after all.
“-the facts of my life are vague flashes over the banal surface of the most banal of lives, little fissures, small discrepancies. These unshaped shapes, allusions and insinuations, topographical irregularities are sometimes insignificant by themselves, but taken together they become strange and haunting, they need a new and unusual form in which their story is to be told. Not a novel, not a poem, because these anomalies are not fiction (or at least not entirely), not a scientific study, because many of these events are singularities that even the laboratory of my mind cannot reproduce.” – p. 70
To reiterate, it’s a messy, digressive, maximalist text. This is not going to be the type of book that serves the sensibility of every reader. If plot and narrative coherence are your preferred pathways into fiction, this isn’t going to be a novel for you. And that’s totally fine, let’s make that clear from the outset. Solenoid is a book that will absolutely divide its audience. Which is partly what drew it to me in the first place. I’ve gone on record before to say that contentious novels that elicit polarized responses are often the ones I have the strongest feelings for. This is no exception.
And so you should also know going in, is that Solenoid is hostile to easy takeaways by design; there’re no fortune cookie interpretations to it (as much as I wish there were; it would make this show so much easier to produce).
So, let’s take stock of its content: memoir, diary, fabulist wish-fulfillment, psychedelic exploration of consciousness; the list goes on. In considering its genre classification, I can’t help but think of William T. Vollmann’s preface to his outstanding collection The Atlas:
“This is an atlas of the world I think in”.
This is exactly the modus operandi I see Cărtărescu working under; a psychological portrait of a particular time and place. Despite its misanthropic and melancholic bend, I see Solenoid as the author’s way of nurturing his deepest anxieties and using them as a sort of fertilizer for creative inspiration. This is exactly why I feel that this concept would be underserved by conventional storytelling. To funnel these preoccupations into cut-and-dry fiction would be to dilute their potency; it would deny the content of his thoughts their purity.
“These [anomalies]… need a new and unusual form in which their story is to be told. Not a novel, not a poem, because these anomalies are not fiction… not a scientific study, because many of these events are singularities that even the laboratory of my mind cannot reproduce. In the case of my anomalies, I can't even separate dreams from ancient memories from reality, the fantastic from the magical, the scientific from the paranoid. My hunch is that, in fact, my anomalies come from that part of the mind where these distinctions do not hold, and that this zone of my mind is nothing but another anomaly.” – p. 70
This is where surrealism finds its utility. Still with me here? At the risk of sounding too middle-school book report about, consider the definition of surrealism:
“SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”
Think about that last sentence in particular: “an absence of control”. One of the defining features of fiction – both literary and genre fiction – is the use of control and precision to achieve a particular outcome. Whether that outcome is narrative, moral, or aesthetic is entirely the prerogative of the author; far be it for me to pass judgment on their creative choices. But what Cărtărescu is aiming for (and in my view, achieves) here, is an unobstructed representation of his mind. Remember, surrealism aims to depict the true functioning of human thought. Not for nothing did Andrei call this “the greatest surrealist novel ever written” (a statement with which I agree, by the way). While a number of novels both classic and contemporary have ventured to capture the essence of thought – Ulysses and Ducks, Newburyport come to mind – Solenoid is one of the first to capture what I might loosely call “the exhumed reality”; not the simple recording of the currents of consciousness, but a loving embrace of the Lovecraftian nature buried in its foundation.
Oh yes, we’re adding Lovecraft into the mix.
Problematic as he may be, I think the existential construction that this author gave rise to is of particular relevance to this book. “Lovecraftian” as a term has been diluted to a vague set of associations (mist and tentacles, you know his shtick). But that’s not what “Lovecraftian” (or by the same token “cosmic” horror) really means. To experience Lovecraftian, cosmic horror is to prostrate yourself in complete subjection before the mass of that which is unknowable or incomprehensible. It’s the fear of what the mind cannot comprehend. There’s so much in this book that defies rational explication, most notably his repeated inquiries into the fourth dimension. I’m going to get to Cărtărescu’s borderline obsessive fixation with the fourth dimension shortly here; but at this point in the discussion, the main thing worth noting is that the fourth dimension is a Hintonian construct that can’t be visualised by the human mind with conventional (or at least, Euclidian) imagery; It is intrinsically incomprehensible.
“You can understand the intelligible, and this is calm; you can understand the unintelligible, and this is power, you can not understand the intelligible, and this is terror; you can not understand the unintelligible, and this is enlightenment. As in the deepest darkness, you can no longer tell if your eyes are open or closed, sometimes I feel that in the midst of my life's fears and tremors, I do not know which side of my brain I am on.” – p. 434
Considering how personal the body of Cărtărescu’s work is, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that his platform as a writer of status is integral to his sense of personhood. And thus a reality where that privilege to prised from him is intolerably terrifying. This author has had a long and lauded career of incredible (and deserved) literary praise, and so I suspect that at this late stage of his development, he’s finally felt accomplished enough to examine this exhumed reality; the terror he’d buried in his mind. A terror which, prior to this point, couldn’t be transacted into words.
I think it’s also critical to keep in mind that this is an author who cut his teeth on conventional literature. He makes regular and continued references to his formative reading experiences in his work. Solenoid is a departure from the strictures of that form. He makes that abundantly clear, very early in the book.
“Like sex, like drugs, like all the manipulations of our minds that attempt to break out of the skull, literature is a machine for producing first beatitude, then disappointment. After you've read tens of thousands of books, you can't help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You've gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you--but again and again, you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.” – p. 42
Jesus fucking Christ, when I read that I just want to break down and cry. Because seriously, in the same way that anti-Mircea uses his manuscript as a means to escape the mundanity of everyday life, I use literature to the same end. I can’t speak for you, but I know for certain that I regularly find myself caught up in the pursuit of a higher creative understanding at the expense of actually living a goddamn life of my own. “Robbed of the frozen crust of reality I once had” – it gives me chills every time I read it. It’s torturous to examine the possibility of the “what if”. I’ll get into that idea a bit later. But to drill down into the centre of what I’m trying to get at here, that’s what I mean when I refer to the world of this book as an unearthing of the “exhumed reality”. Because if it wasn’t fucking gut-wrenching to imagine, then you wouldn’t have buried it in the first place.
The Borina Solenoid
Alright, that’s enough editorialising for the moment. Let’s get back on track and try to make some sense of the plot, shall we?
Despite being a book that is openly and proudly in defiance of the typical conventions of plot (for reasons I spoke of earlier), Solenoid does have a few narrative touchpoints that are worth identifying for both interested readers who are thinking of approaching it for the first time and those who have finished it and are trying to take stock of what they’ve just read.
The novel opens with an alternate ego to Mircea Cărtărescu, the “anti-Mircea” I spoke of previously. This alter ego is a teacher at a small primary school in Bucharest, who by all accounts leads a very bleak life, as evidenced by the memorable opening line to the book: “I have lice again”.
As I discussed earlier the first narrative nexus point occurs in chapter five with a recollection of his reading of the epic, career-launching (or in this case, ending) poem The Fall. The failure of this reading leads him to revoke a career in literature and go about his life in a state of spiritual isolation. The second touchpoint occurs in chapter eight, when the narrator purchases a house in (to put it quite bluntly) the slums of Bucharest – a suburb called Maica Domnului – which, as far as I can tell from my brief searching of it, appears to still exist. Cărtărescu describes it as “nothing but whores and switchblades” which should give you an indication of the sort of socioeconomic state of this place. Mr. Mikola, the old man from whom he buys this “boat-shaped house”, regales the narrator with the story of a physicist name Nicolae Borina, whose life’s work amounted to the invention of the Borina Solenoid, a continuation of the work of Nicola Tesla.
At the risk of grinding the momentum of this literary investigation to a goddamn halt, let me offer you a brief explanation of what a solenoid is. To put it simply, it’s a type of electromagnetic helical coil invented in the 1800s, the function of which is to transmit electrical energy into mechanical work.
It was also brought to my attention by my Twitter friend Nadie (@nadienadienadie), that in the field of mathematics, a solenoid can also denote a topological continuum, which is to say, a one-dimensional, indecomposable continuous structure that exists in a three-dimensional space.
Think of it as from the same family of Euclidian paradoxes as the Mobius Strip or Klein Bottle. I thought this was worthwhile including in my examination of Solenoid, as Cărtărescu has an ongoing fascination with paradoxes, metaphysical continuums, and multi-dimensional exploration. A solenoid seems to me in this case, the perfect object to attract his fascination.
This object, the Borina Solenoid, becomes narratively relevant when it’s revealed to Anti-Mircea that there is one buried underneath this boat-shaped house in Maica Domnului. Moreover, there are a number of them positioned all over this rendition of Bucharest. Nicolae Borina believed in the worldwide presence of magnetic fields that covered the entire globe, with both peaks of high intensity and troughs of energetic absence. The house is one of the high-intensity areas, and thus he placed it there to focalise that energy. What the narrator will come to discover over the course of the book, is the various Solenoids he encounters in his wanderings through the city, which allow him to access alternate dimensions of perception.
From here, the story focalises in and out of the narrator’s memories, recalling a number of signal events in the author’s life, both real and imagined. As he exhumes his life further and further into this manuscript, we follow him as he describes traveling all around Bucharest and the surrounding environs. What you’ll come to see as the reader is that whenever he encounters one of these Solenoids, the narrative shifts into a register that becomes increasingly psychedelic and fantastical, because these objects alter his perception, inviting a world of paradoxes and metaphysical monsters to emerge.
Over the past six weeks during which I've been metabolising this book, I've shared a number of conversations with other readers about it; all of us in varying degrees of… I can't seem to reach for a better word than "befuddlement".
One of the remarks that keeps coming up, is a question pertaining to the meaning of the solenoids, beyond the strictly diegetic. To that point, my friends, I say to you: there is none. The solenoids are a geegaw; a McGuffin. I suspect that little device is just another one of Cărtărescu's idle fixations, onto which he's grafted a function relevant to his story. Their function in isolation isn't important, they only matter in so far as what they offer for the narrator: a portal into altered states of perception.
Let me put it in comparative terms for you. I don't particularly like evoking Infinite Jest, not least of all because it's been analytically vivisected beyond all recognition. And most of that “analysis” has been trying to extract 100lbs of meaning out of a 10lb book. But if I think about the type of socially-maladapted borderline obsessive who's going to be bothered to follow along for to a literary deep dive of this length, I think I’d be safe in assuming you've like read the book yourself.
If you think about JOI’s video tape in the book - the film eponymously titled Infinite Jest - diegetically speaking, it doesn't actually matter what's on the tape. When we find out at the end, it's actually weirdly anticlimactic. What matters is what it does to the people who watch it: it robs them of all functional agency and renders them catatonic living corpses. Take that reading with you and apply a similar concept to the solenoids. It's not what they are, it's what they do that matters.
Flatland and the Fourth Dimension: An Intertextual Investigation
Earlier, I briefly mentioned Cărtărescu's preoccupation with the fourth dimension and I’d like to spend a few minutes devoting some attention to this idea. The concept of dimensional space – both in the literal and abstracted sense – is a salient theme of Solenoid, and I’m of the opinion that if you want to really wrap your mind around this book, you need to take this angle into consideration.
Let me call back to Andrei’s review of the book from 2017, in which he opens the piece by saying “Solenoid is one of the four great novels of the twenty-first century exploring the theme of the fourth dimension”. To lay my cards on the table early, I’ll say here that I wholeheartedly agree with this declaration.
So, how does one begin to describe a dimensional construct that’s defined by its visual incomprehensibility? Let me unburden myself here for a moment and let Cărtărescu do some of the hard work for me. I’m quoting from early in the novel here; chapter six to be precise:
“As a writer, you make yourself less real with each book you write. You always try to write about your life, and you never write about anything but literature […] With every page you write the pressure of the enormous house of literature on top of you grows, it forces your hand to make movements it doesn't want to make, it confines you to the level of the page, even though you could burst through the paper and write perpendicular to its surface […] Could you get out of your own cranium by painting a door on the smooth yellow interior of your brow? The despair you feel is that of one who lives it two dimensions and is trapped inside a square, in the middle of an infinite piece of paper. How can you escape this terrifying prison? Even if you could cross one side of the square, the paper extends endlessly- but that’s not real reason the side can't be crossed, rather, the two-dimensional mind cannot conceive of rising, perpendicular to the level of the world, between the prison walls.” – p. 42
Okay, give me a minute to digest what he’s communicating here because there’s a lot to examine in that passage. Let’s dial into the latter half of that quote a little bit further:
“The despair you feel is that of one who lives it two dimensions and is trapped inside a square, in the middle of an infinite piece of paper […] The two-dimensional mind cannot conceive of rising, perpendicular to the level of the world, between the prison walls.”
What Cărtărescu evokes here, is the image of a flat world – the world of the written page – where a valid and legitimate existence can be imagined, but would exist within the Cartesian confines of x and y. This is where he begins to telegraph another of his many metaphysical influences, Borges being one I’ve mentioned already. One of the principal texts I am certain the author is drawing from here is Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.
Bear with me for a few minutes as I familiarise you with this essential prerequisite. Right from the jump, let me say that is absolutely worth reading, whether or not you decide to read Solenoid for yourself. It’s only 80 or 90 pages and it is, much to my surprise, fucking hilarious (in a dark and metaphysical sort of way). It was written in the late 1800s and is basically a treatise on the decadence and social stratification of Victorian culture. I’m not going to delve too deeply into the social implications of this book (that’s an entire episode in and of itself). But let me give you a broad sense of its content.
The narrator of Flatland is a Square, a two-dimension being whose world consists entirely of x and y, who becomes preoccupied with dimensions beyond his own confines. His life is complicated when he dreams of a world called “Lineland”, where everything exists in a single dimension – the x plane, if you will – and then further encounters a three-dimensional world – or “Spaceland”. Later on, Square is introduced to Point, the sole inhabitant and deity of a non-dimensional universe called (as you might imagine) “Pointland”. There’s a critical moment near the end of the book, where Sphere (a three-dimensional being) speaks to Square (a two-dimensional being) about Point (a non-dimensional being), in a confluence of multi-dimensional interaction:
“‘You see,’ said my Teacher, ‘how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understands them at all, he accepts them as his own – for he cannot conceive of any other except himself – and plumes himself upon the variety of Its Thought as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this god of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction.” – Flatland, p. 80
The solipsistic nature of Point’s experience (all voices being perceived as his own thoughts) is a concept I see in direct conversation with the internal rhythms of Solenoid’s narrator. Square, having become enlightened to the existence of higher dimensions, resigns himself to his 2D existence and returns to his, as he now views it, “imprisonment” in the world of Flatland, and what we’re reading is his manuscript; A manuscript which he’s written as a way to communicate to future generations how much more there is to the world than they realise.
Now, I’m not certain that Cărtărescu has read Flatland but given both the literal and thematic similarities, I am tempted to believe he has drawn some degree of influence from this text. I did, however, find a review of Orbitor (Vol. 2) from 2015 in the Italian newspaper, Il Manifesto, that does include the following quote from the author:
“[People in photographs] recognize only one half of their body and this is because they do not know two dimensions: depth and time. Only linear proximity guides them, but everything that comes from an external world/body that interferes with them - a look, a drop, a word - would be "reinterpreted with the data of that world". Thus, even if something more complex traveled their world - as in Abbott's Flatland - it would have no way of getting them out of the system that not only cages but constitutes them. The binary system would not perform in leaps, it would not open to the third, excluded and included at the same time: the reader.”
Alright, so I’ve been harping on about the implications of Flatland for a while now, so let me try to weave it back into the text of Solenoid:
“We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining, dozens and hundreds of times, every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable.” – p. 79
Forgive my incredulity, but I cannot read a quote like this and not see shades of Edwin Abbott shining through. What Cărtărescu is describing here is a literal flat land, on a scrap of paper, which he feels he is (at least cognitively) confined to. He expresses the idea that the world he is forced to navigate – his dreary, three-dimensional existence teaching maths on the outskirts of urban Bucharest – is a state beneath what is necessary for creative and spiritual transcendence. This is exactly the experience Square goes through in Flatland when he encounters Sphere, his first three-dimensional interaction. Anti-Mircea feels robbed of a higher understanding by being forced into this mundane reality after the failure of The Fall, and uses his manuscript (again, the book we’re reading) the explore the dimensions he has been denied. He views as Manuscript as a portal to a space that conventional literature normally doesn’t venture:
“I have read thousands of books but never found one that was a landscape as opposed to a map. Every page of theirs is flat, but life itself is not. Why would I, a three-dimensional creature, take as a guide the two dimensions of an ordinary text? Where will I find the cubical page where reality is modeled? Where is the hypercubic book whose covers gather the hundreds of cubes of its pages? Only then, through the tunnel of cubes, can we escape from the suffocating cell, or at least breathe the air of another world. If I could breathe the clouds and streets and trams, the trees and women, like the pure air of a much denser world.” – p. 212
We can see here the narrator’s bitterness toward literature is coloured by his exclusion from that artistic community, and he views the many novels he’s read as a facile attempt to escape the world from which they’re being read. They are, as he words it, a “trompe l’oeil” or “trick of the eye”. This is a term coined in the 19th century to describe the painting technique wherein three-dimensional space is realistically depicted in two dimensions (on the canvas). One of the most significant works to employ this technique is Jan van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait”.
By chance do you recognise this painting? Surprise, surprise, we’re getting intertextual again. I can’t claim an influence of The Recognitions on Cărtărescu directly, most immediately because I can’t find any evidence that it’s been translated into Romanian. But in saying that, I can’t help but read these two novels in conversation with one another. William Gaddis’ The Recognitions is one of the penultimate books of the late-modernist period to wrestle with the concepts of art, creative transcendence, and the poioumenon, much in the same way that Solenoid does.
Now I’m not going into the meat and bone of Gaddis’ masterwork here (again, that’s a different episode entirely). Suffice it to say, that this book concerns itself, among many things, with Jan Van Eyck’s famous painting “The Arnolfini Portrait”. This painting is significant primarily because it was one of the first images to vividly embody the perception of three dimensions within the confines of a canvas. At the centre-top-third of the frame, you’ll see a mirror positioned between the two subjects, which reflects the room visible beyond the perspective of the viewer.
This might seem dull in 2022 after we’ve all seen CONTACT and other awe-inspiring mind-bending illusions on film, but in 1434 when this was painted in oil, it was fucking ground-breaking. This technique actually served as a conceptual precursor to the "mathematizing of space" that became the foundation of virtual environments in late 20th-century computing.
Stick with me here. If you spend any time gazing at a Trompe l-oeil painting (Borrell del Caso’s “Escaping Criticism” being a personal favourite of mine) you’ll find yourself nagged by the subtle sense of discomfort that something isn’t quite right. A more contemporary example might be when you look at digital facial reconstructions or deepfakes. That “uncanny valley” is the mind wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of being tricked, while knowing it’s being tricked. If you stare at something like The Arnolfini Portrait or Escaping Criticism, what you’re perceiving is a sense of space and depth in an environment where intuitively, it shouldn’t exist. You’re simultaneously immersed in the illusion while confronted by the artifice of it. That is exactly the technique that Cărtărescu (or more accurately, Anti-Mircea, the narrator) weaponises in his manuscript. He regularly calls attention to the fact that all we’re reading is his diary scrawl, while simultaneously drawing us into the vortex of his multi-dimensional exploration.
“If you could go inside a trompe l’oeil mural, you wouldn't descend into its fraudulent depths, you would only get smaller as you moved along unseen lines of perspective. You wouldn't move through constantly changing spaces […] rather, they would change their shapes constantly […] becoming thinner and thinner as they tried to look deeper and farther away. I often thought that the world, along its three dimensions, is an equally deceiving trompe l'oeil for the infinitely more complex eye of our mind […] by combining rational analysis and mystical sensibility, speech and song, happiness and depression, the abject and the sublime, it will make the amazing rosebud of the fourth dimension open before us, with its pearly petals, with its full depth, with its cubic surface, with its hypercubic volume.” – p. 107
Diametric opposition and cognitive dissonance are both necessary ingredients for a true exploration into this fourth dimension; not least of all because the traveler himself harbours a schizoid identity; I’ll be digging into that idea a little bit later. To put it simply, this manuscript, Solenoid, is both the narrator’s portal into higher planes of perception and the prison of his reality. This isn’t the first time this concept has been toyed with either. Will you stay with me if I get intertextual again?
Edwin Abbot’s novella is, in my view, a direct progenitor to Algernon Blackwood’s short story A Victim of Higher Space. Again, I can’t confirm any direct influence on Cărtărescu, but the similarities are too close not to include here. This story was published in the Occult Review in 1902 which should give you some indication of the literary tradition from which it comes.
Broadly speaking, the story follows the narrator John Silence, as he encounters a man who’s found himself able to enter alternate dimensions, and explores the psychological torment being a “victim of higher space” has caused this person. Listen to how this multi-dimensional traveler describes his venturing into higher space:
“It’s a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world at the present stage of evolution. Higher Space is a mythical state.”
This isn’t just some sort of quantum aberration of hard mathematic contours; it’s a form of spiritual awakening. And if you hold this mystical view of higher dimensional space up against what the narrator of Solenoid has to say about it, I think you’ll find their perspectives uncoincidentally convergent:
“I often thought that the world, along its three dimensions, is an equally deceiving trompe l'oeil for the infinitely more complex eye of our mind, with its two cerebral hemispheres taking in the world at slightly different angles, such that, by combining rational analysis and mystical sensibility, speech and song, happiness and depression, the abject and the sublime, it will make the amazing rosebud of the fourth dimension open before us, with its pearly petals, with its full depth, with its cubic surface, with its hypercubic volume.” – p. 107
Neither of these characters - the Traveller of Anti-Mircea - takes their fourth-dimensional perspective as simply a mathematical anomaly; they view it as a portal to an entirely different perception of reality. Their experience of astral projection is one of spiritual enlightenment, but also profound loneliness, further feeding into the dark, melancholic bend to Solenoid which I’ll get into shortly. John Silence, the narrator of Higher Space, remarks on this by saying:
“Though you may lose your life in the process—that is, your life here in the world of three dimensions […] you might gain what is infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the other. You have here-and-there penetrated, even into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the terror you speak of.”
It’s in reading passages like these that I’m compelled to shy away from “science fiction” as a genre-signifier for both SOLENOID and A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE. Wait wait wait, don’t leave now – this isn’t some bullshit pretention about how “literary fiction is superior genre fiction”. I actually have a justification for this. Cartarescu subverts the rational… and technological… and utopic concerns of that type of science fiction… and instead preoccupies himself with a more spiritual and creative approach to what higher dimensional space can offer him. While he views the fourth dimension as a sort of… escape hatch from his monotonous life, he’s simultaneously mystified… and terrified of what he’ll find on the other side of that divide. That terror is exactly why I see such strong shades of HP Lovecraft’s work in this text, with or without conscious intention.
Side note: If you haven’t read Lovecraft, and are teetering on the edge of whether or not to read him, check out THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE – that was the short story that turned me into an ardent fan. We’ll just put his hysterical racism on the back burner for now.
Okay, we’ve strayed pretty far afield here – let’s see if I can’t dial this back in a bit [coy look/wink]. There’s another angle to the fourth dimension I want to examine, but I’m going to get into that in a later section. Let me offer you this in the meantime. As I mentioned earlier, the book we’re reading is effectively the day-by-day account of a man’s anomalies committed to paper… and he’s describing his writing process in real time. This is where the fourth dimension and the poioumenon begin to converge.
Quick orientation point for you: Poioumenon [Insert definition on screen:]
– it’s basically a type of metafiction that deals with the process of creation; often the writing of the story itself. I’ve read two other books this year that deal with this concept quite generously: America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic, and The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas [hold both books up].
“Poioumenon (plural poioumena) (literature): A specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (sometimes the creation of the story itself)”
In SOLENOID, I would argue that the poioumenonic conceit is in and of itself, a form of multidimensional commentary. Regularly throughout the text, Cartarescu draws attention to the fact that in spite of all the beauty and depth to the prose we’re reading – qualities constructed to absorb us into a text – we’re still simply playing witness to the unstructured, aphoristic ramblings of a failed writer. It’s in these moments of metafictional awareness, when he reverses the direction of the spotlight and shines the light on the artifice, and it seems as if we’re viewing the process from a higher dimension ourselves. You could even read it literally. These words of the paper are flat, constructed, highly manicured for our entertainment. But they are in fact is a trompe l-oeil of their own: they’re a conduit through which we ourselves can pass into the text and show us that the depth of literature extends so much further than the appreciable x, y, and z.
Not buying it? Let me read you that quote from page 79 once more:
“We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining, dozens and hundreds of times, every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable.” – p. 79
Cartarescu wasn’t pulling his punches when he said, “it’s a vertical book; a book directed at the skies”.
Section 8 – The Other Side:
SOLENOID is a picturesque example of a “late career novel”. In an interview from 2016, he said at this point in his life, “‘I had not written anything interesting in nine years, nothing
that would express something to me personally. I felt as if I had reached the end of my career.” [The Poetics of the Hypercycle]
He worked on this novel during what he refers to ‘his most bitter’ years, creatively speaking; a period of profound writers block. It took him four years to gestate the story and another four to write it; He was only two months away from publication in 2015 when he finally wrote his ending, and managed to (to borrow his words) “Unlatch it from the common trunk of Orbitor”. [The Poetics of the Hypercycle]. I think that’s an interesting turn of phrase – “unlatching it from the common trunk”. It shares a lot of connective tissue with his prime trilogy: it’s fractal structure, it’s gnostic narrative thinking, it’s concern with divisible units of the self…
And yet, in considering all these factors, I was still taken aback how dark it is, especially when held in comparison to his euphoric, celebratory trilogy. I would encourage anyone who plans to read this book to read volume one of BLINDING [hold up] first, as I view SOLENOID – in some respects – as the inverse of the world depicted there. While not a necessary prerequisite, I do think your reading of SOLENOID will be heightened by it.
In his interview with De Reactor, Cartarescu states the SOLENOID “is an ethical book, which is very much preoccupied with human destiny and with the distinction between good and evil.” While it would be foolish and reductive to make sweeping statements like “SOLENOID is the evil twin of ORBITOR”, the darker aspects of human experience are a central preoccupation explored with a finer lens in this book.
Let’s track back to an earlier work for a moment. In BLINDING, one of Cartarescu’s principal characters, is the city of the Bucharest itself, which I talk about at length in my previous review. What resonated with me immediately upon starting SOLENOID, was the way in which he related to his surroundings, relative to his previous major work. Take this quote from BLINDING to start:
“The city was a nocturnal tryptic, shining like glass, endless, inexhaustible.” – p. 12
Now compare it against the despairing and melancholic view he takes on his hometown in SOLENOID:
“-Bucharest,was the saddest city on the face of the earth, and this factory had been designed as a ruin from the start, as a saturnine witness to time devouring its children, as an illustration of the unforgiving second law of thermodynamics, as a silent, submissive, masochistic bowing of the head in the face of the destruction of all things […] Bucharest was born on a drawing board from a philosophical impulse to imagine a city that would most poignantly illustrate human destiny: a city of ruin, decline, illness, debris, and rust. That is, the most appropriate construction for the faces and appearances of its inhabitants. […] A quiet isolation beyond humanity…” – p. 98
His depiction of Bucharest in BLINDING is… luminescent; almost exultant. It’s incontrovertible that the author adores his home city. So this tonal contrast came across as an incredibly stark change of emotive register. The question this inherently presents is… why?
I won’t speak for you, but I can say that my relationship with my home cities – both half a world apart from one another – is one of competing impulses. Despite my love for these places, there is this… uncurrent of frustration and distress I feel toward them. It’s not exactly radical to say that every community comes with its challenges. There’s also a political angle which I’ll get into in the next section. What SOLENOID offers Cartarescu, is a means to explore not only the more misanthropic shades of his own psyche, but also his relationship to the world around him. This feeds back into that concept of the “Exhumed Reality” I spoke of earlier; the conduit through which to funnel the most profound depth of his anxieties and frustrations as an artist.
Look, my mind operates in networks of comparison – so let me put this in referential terms. In thinking about Cartarescu’s construction of the “Anti-Mircea”, I’m immediately reminded of William H Gass' relationship to Frederick Kohler in his novel THE TUNNEL [show]. To the unfamiliar, Gass’s narrator in that story is a misanthropic scholar, cataloguing the regrets of his life into a manuscript hidden between the pages of his career-defining book “Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany”.
If you dial out the text and examine THE TUNNEL within the context of Gass' entire career and himself as a person and a writer, you would come to see that what William Frederick Kohler is… is actually a fictive outgrowth of the darker parts of Gass' psyche. He's a sort of photonegative of who the author is in reality. All the lines and contours of the image are there but the shading is inverted. An additional resonance is compacted into this thought experiment as he makes clear to the reader how easily he could've slipped into that alternate life; that alternate mindset.
Gass refers to this mindset as “the fascism of the heart” and I think there’s a degree of that going on in SOLENOID as well. Although where Kohler evokes “a corrupt state of being; a realm of impotent resentment” [Source], Cartarescu channels the pain of his rejection into a search for higher meaning, rather than resigning himself to its depths. But it’s also critical to remember that the other side of Cartarescu’s consciousness isn’t a simple binary approximation of what his inverse might look like; both sides are a necessary ingredient to the functioning of the other. There’s a symbiosis at play here.
“This is what my life is like, how it has always seemed: the singular, uniform, and tangible world on one side of the coin, and the secret, private, phantasmagoric world of my mind's dreams on the other side. Neither is complete and true without the other. Only the rotation, only the whirling, only vestibular syndromes, only a god's careless finger spins the coin, adds a dimension, and makes visible (but for whose eyes?) the inscription engraved in our minds- on one side and the other, on day and night, lucidity and dream, woman and man, animal and god, while we remain eternally ignorant because we cannot see both sides at the same time.” – p. 71
As I spoke of earlier, I’m of the opinion that Cartarescu’s identity is inexorably interwoven with his status as a writer. The idea that this life could’ve so easily not come to the same conclusion, is incomprehensibly terrifying. It’s that Lovecraftian fear of what could’ve been, and how his wonder at the spectacles of the world around him could just as well have been exchanged with a rejection of that cosmic beauty.
“Instead, these were absolute monsters, monsters of the psyche; forms made to suffer eternally in the eternal life of the mind, like regret, like remorse, like embarrassment, like dishonor, like the memory of things that shouldn't have happened and yet burn in your memory like red-hot iron. Like horror beyond horror, the greatest horror, the mother of all out the fear of an eternity in which you no longer exist.” – p. 108
Now before I go all in on this perception of SOLENOID as the inverse of ORBITOR, let me check myself, by way of the novel’s translator. In my discussions with Sean Cotter, I offered up my take that this was darker than his previous work. Sean didn’t quite agree with me:
Sean Cotter: “I’m interested that you say Solenoid skews darker than Orbitor. There are many dark moments, but I found it on the whole more hospitable, more luminous. To my mind, Solenoid seems to have less to prove than Orbitor, which was written not long after 1989. I sense a maximalist chip on the shoulder of Orbitor, while in Solenoid we have an author sure of his material and techniques, taking them yet further into their web of association and logical consequences."
I only have half a leg to stand on here, as I’ve only read the first volume of BLINDING, but I do see what he means when he says SOLENOID has less to provide. ORBITOR as a trilogy, is a totalising venture, wherein the author attempts to cram every one of his creative passions into a single holarchic fractal system. Whether he achieves this is in the eye of the beholder – I won’t be able to weigh in until someone translates Vol 2 and 3 or I sharpen up my French. But we do know that Cartarescu set out to write ORBITOR with the conscious intention of producing his magnum opus. In the 2006 Phantasma event, he stated that “After I finish Blinding, I’ll have the feeling that I’ve paid the fare for my journey through this world.” [Ceseranu, From Blinding to Solenoid].
And so, upon finishing one’s masterwork, I can imagine that an author would feel a vacuum of creative energy and wonder what to do next. While ORBITOR is focused on a number of different overarching concepts – the hallmark of a maximalist novel – one of his principal fascinations is the relationship between units of opposition… and polarity. This is explored in the later volumes through the interactions of twin brothers: Mircea and Victor, who act of as corporeal embodiments of a fractured, schizoid self. While he does take this idea to a satisfying conclusion later in ORBITOR, I don’t think he drew as much blood from that particular stone as he would’ve liked.
As I spoke about earlier, the bifurcation of reality and identity is narrative mechanism that churns constantly under the hood of SOLENOID. We have the failed writer on one side, and the celebrated artist on the other. Dissassociated, segregated identities yes BUT, and this is critical: the membrane between both realities is porous. I’m not even sure that “membrane” or “chasm” or “other side” are the right imagery for this dichotomy. I think Cartarescu’s metaphor of the spinning coin is likely the clearest image of this disconnect:
“I have unkind thoughts about the other one, the author of novels, books of poetry, essays,
Lord knows what else, who peeled away from me in that distant autumn, in the Workshop of the Moon, my conjoined twin separated from me in an invasive operation, a traumatic mutilation. I see him, I know him, I sense him on the other side of the coin, I hear him through the cold metal pellet stamped "heads" on one side and “tails" on the other.”
– p. 596
Keeping this at front of mind, let me return to his principal plot device: the Borina Solenoid. I may have given the impression that these objects are little diegetic consequence beyond their functioning, which – while partly true – isn’t the whole story here. Not for nothing is this book titled “SOLENOID”.
Remember that these devices pop-up all-over Bucharest with increasing frequency throughout the novel. These access points to the fourth dimension could almost be viewed as a sort of turnstile between both realities; a flip of the coin, to borrow his metaphor. So as he begins to weave himself in and out of both realities, the flips of the coin become more and more frequent, until that rotation becomes so fast and continuous that both realities blend into one another and a composite reality emerges; a resolution to both halves of the schitzoid self.
“And at once you see, and suddenly you feel: a fragment of your parallel life becomes palpable, concrete life become palpable, concrete, like any other object in your world.” – p. 487
To put this all into not so many words, let me offer it to you like this: In this thought experiment, the author exiles himself onto the other side a creative chasm from which he is forced to navigate a way back.
Section 9: Iron and Crystal
I raised my suspicions earlier that Cartarescu has a difficult relationship with his home city of Bucharest, and there’s an angle of this I haven’t examined yet: the political conditions under which he was raised.
I’m well aware that writers who hail from the… what we formerly termed “Eastern Bloc” countries, generally don’t like having their work viewed exclusively through this lens. And with good reason – to a reduce a work as nuanced as this down to simply it’s political valence come as a massive disservice, given the many literary complexities at play. However, I don’t think Cartarescu is immune to a political reading of SOLENOID. And here’s why:
“Maybe the world can be described
fold over fold, like the statues at tanagra; maybe the theory
of catastrophes, maybe cantor arepo
but I, curled up like a mouse inside your splendor
a Crystal Palace for the people, mouth gaping like a nimrod” [boldface that phrase]
- P. 356
Did you catch that last line? “A Crystal Palace for the people”. You do not invoke the concept of the Crystal Palace as a writer of Soviet-era heritage without at least a cursory awareness that doing so will add a political charge to the text.
On the off-chance that you’re not already familiar with the term, let me briefly orient you. The Crystal Palace is hugely important symbol in Soviet-era literature (particularly Russian literature). In a nutshell, it’s used to signifier of utopic progress. It was popularised by Chernyshevsky and then recoiled against by Dostoyevsky. If you want an exhaustive survey of the concept, go check out Ekaterina Turta’s thesis, “Socialist Paradise or Tower of Social Surveillance”. I’ve linked it in the description box.
Dostoyevsky – one of Cartarescu’s formative literary influences who is mentioned by named several times throughout SOLENOID – invoked the Crystal Palace as a criticism of the attempts to build a society where the hierarchy are based on intellect and reason alone. For the purposes of this conversation, you really only need to know the broader contours of the concept. The image was first deployed in earnest, and then later in criticism of Socialist Utopian ideals.
Being an avid disciple of Dostoyevsky, one can imagine what side of this divide Cartarescu lands on. He telegraphs it fairly clearly late into the book, where he evokes the Crystal Palace again:
“In their footsteps, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky dug deeper, against the grain of the inept progressivism of their age, to unveil the abyss of the mind, unsoundable like karst complexes: the shame, embarrassment, hopelessness, animal fear, hate, cupidity, and evil
that lie within us, the perverted will that deforms the crystal palace of thought.”
– p. 445
There’s a lot of philosophical legwork being done in this passage, so let me tackle it from one angle in particular: the conflict between rationality and willful free-thinking.
I’ve excised a line from Turta’s thesis on the Crystal Palace as it relates to Socialist thought. I want to use this passage as a sort of springboard as I extend further into the desert of digression. And yes, I know I’m straying pretty far from the text proper. But in doing so, my hope is that you’ll start to see the network of thematic intersections begin to take shape. Because this isn’t just a disparate array of idle fixations; Cartarescu’s schema is a carefully structured holarchy. Here’s the line I’m talking about:
“Socialists maintain that man is neither willful nor capricious, because all his deeds comply with the laws of nature. For that reason, they are certain that after science re-educates man, he will desire only the rational and the Crystal Palace will be constructed.” – p. 58
I can tell you firmly, right here and now, that Cartarescu thinks this is a load of shit. The only way to back up that claim, is to descend back into the fourth dimension we just came from. Hang in there.
The Anti-Mircea’s fixation with the fourth dimension can be traced back to his discovery of Charles Hinton, a man who play a significant narrative role in the book. There’s a great piece on him I’ve linked below if you’re interested. Hinton was an early hyperspace philosopher and the first person to put a name to the hypercube: a tesseract. You may also recognise his name from Borges fantastic short story “Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbus Tertius.”. In order to help him visualise the fourth dimension, Hinton constructed a visual mnemonic – a series of coloured cubes – that could be arranged as a way to assist the viewer to help comprehend four-dimensional space. Here’s Cartarescu remarking on him roughly halfway through SOLENOID:
“The fourth-dimension visualization technique […] involved the simultaneous visualization of all cubes’ interior colors, such that the mind would enter the great multicolored cube, seeing its hidden depths just as clearly as its surfaces, grasping the whole of it at the same time, exactly as it would be seen by an inhabitant of the fourth dimension. After a monumental and exhausting practice […] the mental barriers suddenly fell and— in an amazing miracle—the tesseract appeared in the middle of the brain, like a portal to a higher world of an inexpressible grandeur.” – p. 378
This viewpoint of a higher dimension rivals the strictures of three-dimensional thought so profoundly that those who witness it become enamoured with it the point of madness. Some might even call them “a victim of higher space”. That’s right – Charles Hinton also acted as the conceptual inspiration behind two of the most formative works of multi-dimensional fiction. That’s right: FLATLAND, and A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE. His work trying to understand the fourth dimension was a vocation of formative mathematical genius, but also the source of significant psychological torture, as envisioned by Cartarescu. In this depiction, Hinton’s cubes drive himself and everyone who uses them to the edge of insanity.
“The sale of Hinton’s kit was soon halted, because psychiatric hospitals were filling up with more and more adepts of the colored cubes. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of cases of women and men discovered in their rooms with a lap full of cubes, with an unfinished great cube on the table, which they stared at vacantly, without seeing it, within a cataleptic state from which they never returned. Others reached ecstasy in the bathtub, the front lawn, at dinner, or while reading the newspaper, or even while sleeping, because like the continual prayers of the hesychasts, manipulation of the cubes and visualization of their interior faces became a continuous, automatic activity in the minds of these searchers for the absolute. The cubes appeared in front of their eyes at every moment, whatever they were doing, and their agitated manipulation continued within their dreams. Those to whom, after months or years of work with the cubes, the tesseract appeared might become inhabitants of the world above, but here, in our world, nothing remained of them but a prostrated carcass, exiled to a white-walled sanatorium.” – p. 379
Let’s dial out a minute and look at these texts referentially. All of these characters who encounter the fourth dimension share the same outcome: The traveller in Victim of Space, Square in Flatland, Anti Mircea in SOLENOID, and Hinton in reality, have their understanding of reality shattered when presented with higher dimensional perception. So much so that to return to a normal life is akin to being imprisoned. Or is it? I’ll get back to that.
So what does all this fourth dimensional chatter have to do with a socialist reading of SOLENOID? Let me loop back in the concept of the Crystal Palace, specifically as Dostoyevsky views it in NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND.
The Underground Man polemicizes at his imaginary reader who, in his eyes, adheres to the earnest belief in the Crystal Palace, convinced that all human behaviour is dictated by nature, rationality, and reason. By that token, any person enlightened by science and amenable to reason would inherently become a functioning member of society. If everyone shared these values, the Golden Age of Humanity would begin, and the Palace as it was imagined would be built.
But here’s the thing: I’ve offered you four characters who are presented with the pinnacle scientific reason – the fourth dimension – that is “calculated with mathematical exactitude” (to borrow the Underground Man’s words). And how do they respond to that evidence? You tell me:
“How amazed I was when [I was told] about the chaos that the amoral, young genius produced in this family, unraveling its logico-mathematic geometry, exploding its Victorian principles, and infusing their thoughts with the telescopic insanity of the fourth dimension: worlds within worlds, in the depths and heights arranged in an asymptotic spiral of grandeur that the poor ganglion imprisoned in our skulls cannot comprehend. How can you not think that Hinton is a sign, a model trajectory, a map for your great escape plan?” – p. 456
I don’t know how you could read that and think that adherence to rationality and reason are the only necessary ingredients for socialist devotion. As Cartarescu presents it, this form of enlightenment would inherently cause a person to retreat from the rigors of society, and search for an entirely new path to self-actualisation. It’s either that or… accept the burden of your higher understanding and resign yourself to societal imprisonment; become a victim of higher space. To add to that, let think critically about the formal technique that Cartarescu employs in this study - surrealism. Let me call back to the definition I read to you earlier:
“SURREALISM, n. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason.”
You can’t get there from here. Reason and rationality are not the avenues to enlightenment. There’s an intrinsic psychological torment that must come with this nonconforming perspective on life and society… especially in an environment so rigorously opposed to dissident thinking. Think about the setting of the novel – 1960’s Romania. These events occur at a time when it was still a one-party socialist state, under Marxist-Leninist rule. The socialist body politic is an incredibly dogmatic power structure… which isn’t saying much given that the overwhelming majority of political ideologies are inherently dogmatic. You know, to more or less outspoken effect. But Socialism was the default political condition Cartarescu was exposed to in his formative years of artistic maturity, and so I’m using it as the ideological reference point when examining the text as a whole.
Now I don’t need to offer a political takedown of socialism here, as many people a lot smarter than me have done so already. If you want a novelist who takes this idea to its furthest extreme, I highly recommend you check out Vladimir Sorokin. Instead, I want to focus on the conceptual connection between socialist literary protest and the fourth dimension. And it relates back to my use of the word “dogmatism”.
Dogmatic or doctrinarian thinking is, above all else, defined by the expressor’s unwillingness to visualize a perspective that runs counterintuitive to their own. I think part of why Cartarescu is so drawn to the work of Charles Hinton, is that his view of the fourth dimension isn’t simply one of mathematical affinity; there’s also a moral basis to his research on the subject. Here’s a line from Anne De Witt’s book on moral authority as it pertains to science:
“Hinton argues that gaining an intuitive perception of higher space required that we rid ourselves of the ideas of right and left and up and down, that inheres in our position as observers in a three-dimensional world. Hinton calls the process "casting out the self", and equates it with the process of sympathizing with another person, and implies the two processes are mutually reinforcing.”
The fourth dimension isn’t just a means for the narrator to escape the boundaries of the world; it allows him to experience a system of thought and perception different from his own. Cartarescu telegraphs this maverick thinking early on by expressing his attraction to the novel THE GADFLY by Ethel Voynich.
I personally haven’t read the book yet, so talk to Ben from Beyond the Zero [insert show logo] if you want a more informed take. But as I understand it, the story is situated during the Italian Risorgiomento, or “state unification”, and revolves around a renounced Catholic turned anti-Authoritarian revolutionary. And so having been raised in an environment of communist stricture and Kafkaesque autocracy, Anti-Mircea becomes immediately enamoured with this novel, and its deeply humanist perspective on life, art, and society.
Pre-90’s Romania was no joke. By all accounts, it was – at least in part – a bleak, industrial wasteland. This is part of why I suggest that Cartarescu has a difficult relationship with his home city – because despite being the blueprint for his dreamy, surrealist world, its lineage is one of poverty, political repression, and social immobility. Again, further fuel for the competing impulses; the schitzoid identity. But don’t take my word for it – listen to the author yourself. This is from a 2005 interview in the Romanian newspaper Formula AS:
“It is a city extremely ugly and, overall, criminally not looked after by its councillors. In fifteen years, there was no renovation of the few rests of the historic part of the city that still stands. And we’ll never get rid of the horrible dormitories areas – the communist blocks. Nothing can be done there. The Bucharest of my writings is a total imaginary one, a mixture of true dreams and fake memories. For over ten years I’ve patiently reconstructed, from such fragments with strange and unverifiable origin, a city identifiable with a book and a brain: my “Blinding”, my Bucharest.
This is one of Cartarescu’s incredible gifts as a novelist: he doesn’t feed you an ideological standpoint explicitly. He nests his worldview within a fractaline assemblage of poetic and literary and artistic images. Don’t mistake that for some sort of NLP dog whistle – I don’t believe for a second that he set out to write a politically-forward text, buried under a shapeless mound of noise and misdirection. I just think the recusant element is simply the natural biproduct of a person who’s lived under oppressive conditions. And this applies to the Mircea in reality and the anti Mircea in the novel. I think art provided him from a very early age, a window into a wholly novel construction of reality, and has spent his entire career looking for new and innovative ways to break down the arbitrary barriers that were there the moment he arrived on the scene. The iron curtain, and the crystal palace.
Again, if you’re not buying it, here’s a very roughly translated rendition of the final lines of his earliest major work: THE FALL.
“Masks in azure
and, passing, a green
wave, tearing apart histories and structures [boldface this line]
anonymous eyes
over the arrow of the waters of light
and beyond the ancient semantics of death
and beyond the thighs and births
they tear like dresses with cold flight”
- The Fall, Canto 4, final line
Section 10 - Mail Call
Section 11 – Diaries, Dreams, and Departures
I have this nagging feeling… that analysing an author’s influence is mostly just a means for “critics” to spin their tires while their grasp for something actually meaningful to say. And while I am by no means a critic (despite my algorithm feeding use of the word “review” in this video’s title), I have fallen into this trap before, clogging up my airtime with comparisons based almost entirely in conjecture. I’ve been thinking to myself what the practical utility of the analysis of influence actually offers those who bother to listen this far into a video.
So, if you’re still with me here, in the case of SOLENOID, I think there is a utility in talking about a few authors in particular whose work feeds directly into this text. I’ve already talked about Borges, so I’m going to shift my focus toward the other figure who looms largely over the novel: Franz Fuckin’ Kafka. Let’s start with a quote from that De Reactor interview:
“This is also the dilemma of the main character in Solenoid – a character with no name – who teaches at a high school on the outskirts of Bucharest and who dreams of becoming a writer. And just because he couldn’t become a normal and “banal” writer, he becomes a true writer. A writer similar to Franz Kafka, for example. A writer who doesn’t play the game, who writes only for himself” [UT Interview]
Cartarescu and his narrator in SOLENOID make it explicitly clear that Kafka is an omnipresence in their shared creative thought. Not just the Kafka you get taught in first year lit classes – The Trial, The Castle, etc. He’s talking deep-cut Kafka; the messy, aphoristic, half-formed texts that acted as not only the foundation of the author’s major works but also the clearest window into his mind. Cartarescu lays his influence on the table very early in the book in stating “The book I hold dearest, [is] Franz Kafka's Diaries.” – p. 164
I’ve always been of the opinion that Kafka’s best work can be found in his diaries, his short stories, his letters, rather than his novels. His selected diaries published by Schocken [hold up] is… a pretty seminal text for anyone who wants to study existential literature. And in bringing this book up, I’m trying to tow a line between examining the Diaries in reference to SOLENOID without falling too deep down the proverbial rabbit hole of examine Kafka on his terms. ‘Cause if I haven’t made this abundantly clear already, Kafka is – my money money – just one of the most goddamn fascinating figures in literary history bar none. So I’m gonna do my best to tighten the threads as I go along here.
Alright, so why the diaries? I don’t keep one myself – I’ve tried in the past but have failed for various reasons relates both directly and indirectly to my mental health. I’ve found personally, that lending credence to the contents of my anxious mind only strengthens the resolve of my doubts. So I, quite literally, burned the one or two notebooks I had to show for my efforts. Back this isn’t about me, is it?
As I understand it, one of Kafka’s most salient reasons to keep a diary himself was to stoke the fires of his creativity in the hopes that some form of literary inception might emerge out of pure consistency. Well, uh… newsflash: he was right. You’ll find working drafts of a tonne of his canonical texts in there - Amerika, In the Penal Colony, The Judgement… that’s all I have off the top of my head. And lot of the content of those diaries can actually be drawn directly from Kafka’s dreams, as he describes in his innumerate entries. See, Kafka used his dreams as a blueprint for his major prose and philosophical work… and I think this is a model Cartarescu drew from in his own creative life. Take this for example. I pulled this from that De Reactor interview I mentioned earlier:
“I’ve been writing a journal since I was seventeen years old, I’ve written down almost all the dreams that I’ve had during my lifetime […] Some of them, were absolutely stunning for me. They actually determined some of my books. I use these dreams, which I have really dreamt, as skeletons for some of my writings.” [UT Interview]
There is a certain… implicit, instinctual dream logic that governs the body of SOLENOID so I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if he conceived of this alter… antithetical reality in his dreams. Schematically speaking, the book is – as he states early on – a report of the author’s anomalies; a notebook of his thoughts and daily happenings; It’s a diary. And there’s a linear progression throughout the book… with which Anti-Mircea divests himself from his day-to-day reality and descends deeper and deeper into his own mind. This again, is intrinsically Kafkaesque in its logos.
“What will be my fate as a writer is very simple. My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me.” – FK Diaries, August 6th, 1914
Now, irrespective of the conceptual equivalencies between the two texts, there is a point to why I’m bringing this up in detail. Kafka presides over the world of SOLENOID as a sort of guardian angel… or creative mentor to Anti-Mircea. And there are two instances of leitmotific recurrence in SOLENOID that I want to hone in on, both of which relate to Kafka. The first is a passage, and the second is a question.
"The master of dreams, the great Issachar, sat in front of the mirror, his spine against its surface, his head hanging far back, sunk deep into the mirror. Then Herman appeared, master of the twilight, and she melted into Issachar's chest, until she completely disappeared”.
– p. 209
Alright, so this a line again drawn directly from Kafka’s Diaries. I went searching through my Schocken edition [hold up] that spans 1910-24 but couldn’t find it anywhere. With an assist from my Instagram friend @bifurcat [show handle on screen] , I found out that it never made it into the English edition of the text, but was included in the notes and fragments section of the Chinese translation. We may get it included in the unabridged edition that’s coming out in Jan from PRH [show pic on screen]
I’m going need a few minutes of elliptical explanation to get to the point here, but I promise, there is a point here. Issachar is a name derived from rabbinical literary myth. There’re a few interpretations of it, but the one I personally subscribe to, is it’s etymological origin “yesh sakar” meaning “there is a reward” – keep it in mind. Issachar was believed to be founder of the one of the twelve tribes of Israel, which were – among many things – nomads. They were searchers. Given that Kafka was raised Jewish, I don’t think I’m stretching too far out on a limb to think he had… at least a working understanding of Rabbinical myth. And given Cartarescu’s fascination with lineage, ancestry, and mythology – as evidenced by both SOLENOID and BLINDING – I can also see why he would be so attracted to this passage.
I also think the integrative element – the binding of Herman and Issachar’s bodies – is also thematically relevant to how SOLENOID concludes. Oh yes, we’re getting into the ending here, so… spoiler alert [put “spoiler alert” warning on screen] for those who are averse to that sort of thing. But before I get to that, I also need to backtrack and touch on that other question I mentioned early.
Midway through the text, the narrator’s lover Irina asks a question of him that recurs rhythmically throughout the book: If you were in a burning building and only had the capacity to save a priceless work of art or a child, which would you choose? For someone who’s salient interpersonal characteristic is social alienation, it surprises Irina to learn that the narrator would pick the child every time. He answers it with confidence at first, but I don’t think he understands why he feels that way. The answer just comes to him implicitly.
“What I am writing here, evening after evening, in my house in the center of my city, of my universe, of my world, is an anti-book, the forever obscure work of an anti-author. […] I don’t lie to anyone, painting doors that will never open on the walls of this Piranesian world.” – p. 492
The narrator of this novel has spent the better part of 650 pages divesting himself entirely of the world around him and pouring himself into a multi-dimensional literary labyrinth from which he has to escape. One of the central ironies of that quest – that search – is that escape from this world of dreams and anomalies he’s created for himself would mean imprisonment in the bleak, industrial, communist world from which he feels isolated and rejected. This is a character who feels fundamentally alone, despite the presence of a lover.
His life is complicated when Irina, his lover, becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child. And the birth of this child ushers in a shift in the behaviour of the solenoids around the city. At the climax of the book, the solenoid at the very centre of Bucharest – under the forensic museum – becomes unstable, and the ground under the city begins to open. A chasm forms in front of Anti-Mircea, Irina, and their daughter, and his is forced to make a choice: does he save his manuscript, the result of years of intense, isolating work… or does he save his daughter. I’m sure you can imagine what choice he makes.
“My manuscript, the humble notebooks, swollen with the weight of ink, with circular coffee stains, where I had written for years in the effort to understand my anomalies, my mind, and my life. I broke into sobs and dampened the last page with tears, a fitting addition of salt to a sacrifice before the altar. Irina, pale as death, was now shoulder to shoulder with me. At the same moment, we held them both over the fire, the girl and the manuscript. One by one, I let the notebooks fall into the flames, while the woman I loved pulled our child back to her chest […] I would stay, forever, the prisoner of this valley. I knew now that I could not have left alone, that I was bound in brotherhood and in love to all of my kind. […] Only as my manuscript disappeared into the flames did I begin to feel I truly had a life.” – p. 673
[maybe stock footage of fire here? Burning pages?]
I’ve spent the better part of two hours casting a pretty wide net of literary interconnections that all converge at SOLENOID. What I’m really trying to get at with all these authorial references is the totalising nature of this book. Fuentes did this with TERRA NOSTRA, Joyce did it with FINNEGANS WAKE, and now Cartarescu has done it with SOLENOID: A book which exerts a gravitational pull on all the texts that surrounds it, and in compressing all its influences into a single unit of energy and creates something new entirely. And the beautiful, metatextual irony at play here is that in absorb the work of his forebearers, Cartarescu is actually motivated by a desire to destabilise, deconstruct, and destroy the myth of literature. He needs these source texts as fuel for the flames, and that’s exactly what he does with them: he fucking burns them. Because it’s not about telling a story: it’s about understanding oneself. And if you think about this in relation to Kafka, this is exactly what he intended to do as well, literally. He asked Max Brod to burn all of his work. And thank Christ he didn’t do so, or we may never have gotten SOLENOID at all.
“If I were a writer, I would have remained hidden forever, obscure, half-forgotten, down to the most meaningless trace, because no novel, by definition, can tell the truth, the only thing that matters, the true interior of the writer's life. Since I am not a writer and do not paint false doors on the walls, I am content to write, and this contentment takes the place of glory. When I write here, in this already enormously swollen diary, I feel a cool, blue halo surround my skull. I write in the dark, by the imperceptible light of my glory. Only this light feeds the darkness of the world, only this light does not frighten the hordes arriving from the depths.” – p. 156
The narrator is an Issacharian exile, wandering through a desert of isolation in search for the one thing his life lacks: a resolution to the competing impulses of his fractured identity. And he finds it at the end of this book through Irina and his daughter at the cost of his life’s work. Again, we arrive at a moment of contradiction. In separating himself from his manuscript he finally introduces a coherence into his world. He assimilates the “other” on the opposite side of the coin.
The project of this manuscript was a search to understand and establish a sense of identity. At the risk of sounding like a low-rent palm reader, I truly believe you can’t open up to the world around you until you understand and accept yourself. Yesh shakar – “there is a reward”. This is the reward he earns when he returns from his search. He abandons the phantasmagorical fourth dimension in favour of “imprisonment” in the regular world. But in doing so, he finds for the first time in his life, that he’s actually at home in that world. This decision - burning the manuscript and saving the child - allow for the resolution of both halves of the schitzoid self - Mircea the author of SOLENOID [hold book up] and Anti-Mircea the writer of the manuscript… which is also SOLENOID - to coalesce into a single identity. This intrinsic sense of self, achieved through the exploration of his dreams, provides a conduit through which genuine human connection becomes possible.
Still don’t believe me? Read the last goddamn lines of the book:
“And now, in a few moments, I will set these last pages on fire over the chasm. I will watch the feathers of ash descend, in wide spirals, toward its unsoundable depth. Then we will leave toward the east. I’ve spoken with Irina; we know what we will do. We will follow along the edge of the road, beyond the village of Voluntari, and toward Afumați, we will find the oak grove where we once collected acorns. A ruined chapel is waiting for us there, and as we knew when we first found it, this will be our last home. There, between its rickety, fresco-covered walls, we will grow old together. There, I will push my head deeply into the waters of dream, and Irina will melt like the dusk into my chest. We will stay there forever, sheltered from the frightening stars.” - p. 675 [boldface this part of the text please]
SOLENOID represents one of the most profound exhumations of an author’s psyche I have ever read. It is a work that ingests the influence of dozens, hundreds of iconic works of literature before it, and uses them as the brick and mortar a labyrinth from which a human being has no choice but to search for an escape. And it’s a deeply dark experience by design: that darkness is necessary insofar as it reflects the human experience as is, with all the isolation and anxiety that one will experience in the process of constructing their identity. This is why this book is important; why it matters to me. Because I have spent the better part of my life in an ongoing struggle with my mental health. Before I sought professional help, I spent countless nights laying awake, turning over memories both real and imagined in my mind and thinking to myself “where would my life be if that had gone differently”. I get the impulse to travel down this garden path, but it’s a journey that leads nowhere. To put it in Borgesian terms, it’s just a series of Circular Ruins. And a crucial lesson that took me years to learn is that asking that question over and over again just separates me from the world I actually have. The only way to divest oneself from their mental torment is to walk away from it, which is what I’ve been working to do. And it’s what Anti-Mircea, who indeed becomes just Mircea by the end, does as well.
I wish I could’ve read this years ago when it’s lesson could’ve served me in my darkest moments. But I am truly ecstatic that I have it now. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It is everything that Andrei said it was in that review years ago, and more. So stop watching my nonsense and get to your nearest bookstore. Run, don’t walk.
I promised you superlatives so let me cash in that commitment: This is the greatest surrealist novel ever written. [fade out into WASTE logo with my theme music queue in/out]
Section 12 – Afterword:
Alright, this one was massive so if you’re still watching, I’m honestly impressed. Before I leave for the evening, I’d like to mention a couple of thing and provide a few thanks.
Firstly, I do feel compelled to apologise for the long gaps between episodes. Without getting too digressive, I have a quite intensive day-job that has nothing to do with literature, so finding time to research and compose these episodes has been a challenge. However, I want to assure you, my passion for this project has only grown. I simply need you as my generous viewers to be patient as I do my best to put together a product that is – hopefully – substantive and informative. That will – unfortunately – take time. But I’ve got several in the pipeline I’m looking forward to composing.
Second, given the length of the material I needed to cover, this episode was filmed over several sessions of recording so if picked up on any discordant cuts, insertions, or lighting changes, well now you know why. I tried my best to keep the continuity as clean as possible.
I’d like to offer my continued and enthusiastic gratitude to Will Evans [twitter handle link on screen], Walker Rutter-Bowman, and Linda Stack-Nelson for very generously providing me an advance copy of the book. Let the record show that my receipt of this book was not contingent on a positive review, and everything I have to say about it entirely the output of my own enthusiasm; there’s no conflict of interest here.
Thank you to Sean Cotter who has been very generous in offering me his time to help answer questions about the book and his experience working on it. Moreover, he’s the person I have to thank for getting to read it at all. I couldn’t have done it without you, and your work is exquisite. I hope you’ll continue to translated Cartarescu.
I’d like to thank Andrei from the Untranslated for, obviously, turning me onto the book, and just the work he does in general. He blog is incredible, he’s introduced me to so many wonderful authors and books I never would have known without him, and he’s been an extremely kind supporter of my little project here as well. So Andrei, if you’re watching or listening, thank you – keep doing what you’re doing.
Thank you again to Christopher Robinson who has once again given me permission to use his music as a backdrop for this episode. He also did the music I used in my Blinding review which is worth watching for his sonic ambience alone. He’s doing some incredible work which you can find on Bandcamp – I’ve linked it below.
My biggest thanks today goes to Nick Brodie, who was incredibly generous in offering to edit this video for me. He’s added some excellent creative flourishes to the whole thing and made it, in my opinion, a more enjoyable experience to watch. He’s also just taken a massive workload off my plate in doing so, so it truly is appreciated. Now I know you’re editing this right now, so don’t cut it out – stop that. If you do, you’re fired.
You can also follow Mircea Cartarescu who has delightfully developed a presence on Instagram of all places [show text of his IG handle on screen]. It’s been a pleasure watching his updates and I always get a little dopamine hit when he likes my posts.
BTZ Sean Cotter Interview
Books of Som Substance Guest Spot
Sean from Travel Through Stories
Alright, that’s enough, this has been exhausting. I’m gonna go read some James Patterson and give my brain a rest. Ciao