SOLENOID
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
Solenoid is a novel by Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu, drawn partly from his own years as a schoolteacher in Bucharest. The book takes the form of a diary kept by a failed poet who works in a crumbling school on the outskirts of the city. Set during Romania's communist period, the narrative moves through the routines of classroom life, difficult encounters with the state health system, and the strains of raising a family under an oppressive bureaucracy. These ordinary pressures are recorded with close, sometimes exhausting detail.
From this grounded starting point, the novel opens outward into stranger territory. The diarist visits a tuberculosis preventorium, encounters an organized movement protesting death itself, and follows a group dedicated to the study of dreams. One extended passage describes a miniature civilization of dust mites observed through a microscope. The book folds autobiography, fiction, philosophy, mathematics, and history into a single structure, searching for exits from the constraints of daily existence through alternate dimensions and parallel possibilities.
Cărtărescu is one of Romania's most prominent living writers. Solenoid, originally published in Romanian, is a large-scale work that mixes the domestic and the cosmic, treating Bucharest's streets and apartment blocks as sites where reality can split open without warning.
