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Solenoid

Solenoid

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By Mircea Cărtărescu
Translated by Sean Cotter

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New YorkerPublishers WeeklyThe Financial TimesWords Without Borders

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

Explore Solenoid further with the Solenoid Reader, a free companion download!

Publication Date: October 25, 2022

Paperback: 9781646052028
eBook: 9781646052035

Description

Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life, while on a broad scale Solenoid's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines attempt to reconcile the realms of life and art. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis preventorium, encounters with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. One character asks another: When you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? 

Combining fiction with autobiography and history—Nikola Tesla and Charles Hinton, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous dimensions erupt within the present.

Biographical Note

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

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

Reviews

"A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written."  Kirkus (starred review)

"Solenoid. . . is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. . .That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel’s sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. . . In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself." —Dustin Illingworth, New York Times

"Instead of delivering a sharp, succinct punch, Solenoid goes the way of the oceanic—rejecting brevity because the author, a Romanian Daedalus, is laying the foundation for a narrative labyrinth…The writing itself is hypnotic and gorgeously captures the oneiric quality of Cărtărescu’s Bucharest…Cotter’s translation is attentive to the efficiency of Cărtărescu’s ornate but surprisingly approachable prose, gliding from sentence to sentence and calling little attention to itself. The sheer immensity of Cotter’s undertaking combined with the unfailing evenness of the translation’s quality is nothing short of remarkable." —Ben Hooyman, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cărtărescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"[S]omething of a masterpiece. . . Solenoid synthesizes and subtly mocks elements of autofiction and history fiction by way of science fiction. The result is unlike any genre in ambition or effect, something else altogether, a self-sufficient style that proudly rejects its less emancipated alternatives. . . The mesmerizing beauty of creation, of reality giving way to itself: that, above all, lies behind the doors of Solenoid."—Federico Perelmuter, Astra Magazine

The Solenoid Reader

Explore Solenoid further with the Solenoid Reader, a free companion download!

A Solenoid Reader is the opposite of a book of sources, because the novel’s networks do not lead backward. Reading all the texts mentioned in Solenoid would do nothing to unravel its mysteries. We move from Solenoid forward to the texts, searching, in the manner of the novel. We read more, not to unravel but to revel in the perception of mystery.