International Dublin Literary Award
Solenoid
A schoolteacher-narrator in suburban Bucharest moves through everyday frustration, dreams, philosophy, history, and mathematics in a novel that keeps pushing at the boundaries of reality. Against the pressure of communist Romania, it explores escape and the power of literature on a vast scale.
Work Information
A novel that begins in an ordinary day and keeps searching for a way out beyond the world.
Solenoid expands from the details of teaching life into cosmic imagination, stitching together memory, fantasy, history, and philosophy in a monumental search for a way out of reality. Starting from the claustrophobia of Bucharest, it draws the reader into a larger movement of thought that exceeds individual experience.
Review Summaries
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Readers praise the book's imaginative range, dream logic, and philosophical ambition. Some find its density and length demanding, but many see that overwhelming scale as part of its appeal.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Pushkin Press
- Published
- 2024-06-06
- Pages
- 640 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 19.8 x 12.9 x 1 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781805333197
- ISBN-10
- 1805333194
- Price
- 3817 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Biographical
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025 WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION 'An instant classic' New York Times Based on Cartarescu's own experience as a teacher, Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life and spirals into an existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics. Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, it grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths. In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present. PRAISE FOR SOLENOID 'Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult' TLS 'A bravura performance' The Nation 'Surreal and viscerally political' FT 'Nothing short of remarkable' Los Angeles Review of Books 'A masterpiece' Astra Magazine
Mircea Cartarescu 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.
Reviews
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Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu is one of the best contemporary novels I've read in several years. Some of the reviews call this a surrealistic novel. That's a reasonable label so far as it goes. It reminds me of some movies I like that are usually called surrealistic: Brazil, The City of Lost Children, Dark City, Delicatessen, The Fountain, Pi, and eXistenZ. I hear echoes of Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, James Joyce, Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, John Donne, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and something like The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in the text. That said, this work is a unique, strange, funny, wonder-filled, and beautifully written creature. The sections where the narrator remembers his childhood are excellent: the twin he may or may not have had, trips to doctors and dentists, and time spent at the Preventatorium convey brilliantly the sense that children live in a world different from the one adults inhabit, with different rules, different understandings. I found the short section about his marriage to Stefana quite striking. The Picketists are a marvelous invention. The descriptions of the narrator’s job as a teacher, his colleagues, and the fads and obsessions at the school feel very real. When you first read the sections on Nicolae Vaschide, George Boole’s daughters, Charles Howard Hinton, and E. L. Voynich, the impression you may have is that he’s making it all up. But it turns out he isn’t. Finally, serving as a backdrop, is the “majestic grandeur” of Bucharest. There is so much in this novel; it would take pages and pages to list just the good parts. I highly recommend it.
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Magical realism at its best.
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Solenoid is such an incredible novel-I was completely blown away by this book! Cartarescu has clearly shown that he is one of the world’s foremost writers and I am expecting him to win the Nobel Prize in the near future. Easily one the best books I have read in a long while. The translation is superbly done by Sean Cotter. A surrealist novel, the book has fantastic dreamlike passages that will leave you in a trance, and the ending will simply blow your mind. Don’t let the book’s length put you off; it is well worth the time and effort.
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Tyranny creeps through the readers scalph in the guise of head lice. State sponsored lies seeps into your brain and sucks the blood of reason and reality. Surrealist serenade from beneath your balcony, seducing the reader to the realms of Dali & Co.
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Melted my brain. Absolutely in love w this.
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