レビュー要約

• 読者は、想像力の振幅の大きさ、夢の論理、哲学的な射程の広さを高く評価している。密度と長さを負担に感じる声もあるが、その圧倒的な量感自体が魅力として受け止められている。

レビュー

• 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.

• Magical realism at its best.

• 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.

• 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.

• Melted my brain. Absolutely in love w this.

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