A review by flyingfox02
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

challenging dark reflective

2.5

Solenoid is a book saturated with ideas, from the extremely large to the incredibly small, from the astronomical and grandiose to the infinitesimal and invisible. The meaning of life, the purpose of living, death, dreams, bodily fluids, organs, insects, dust, mites. All have a place within the pages of this tome. 

 

It’s written in the form of diary entries and opens with our navel-gazing narrator plucking bits of twine out of his belly-button. This was a big fat sign saying “This book is achingly self-indulgent, proceed with patience”. The writing style I would also describe as hypnotic and feverish. The narrator experiences strings of unsettling memories, terrorising dreams, and phantasmagoric visions. A house with endless rooms, a school with ever-changing hallways, enlarged microscopic creatures, murderous giant statues. 

 

Gentle reader, I was not patient. Those hallucinatory and surrealist aspects are the subject of praise from critics and casual readers alike. But they irritated me. To others, these ramblings might be inspiring and truly thought-provoking. To me they were nonsensical. The plotlessness didn’t help. My mind couldn’t stop wandering and wondering how these fantastical ideas would converge and what the point of it all is. 

 

Pages upon pages upon pages were spent on his dream journals. I’m so sorry bro but no one cares if sometimes your head falls off your neck in the middle of the night. Take these parts out and the book would not be the lesser for it. 

 

I also have a bone to pick with the way women are written. The number of times they’re described as voluptuous and voluptuously showing their voluptuousness and the “flowery” “nautilus” “between their elephantine legs”… Fella I know we’re horny but pack it in I beg you. 

 

The first half of the book was almost a chore to read. But I thought if I could finish One Hundred Years of Solitude, I could finish any book. So I persevered. 

 

My review has been very negative so far, but this novel had its moments, especially after around the halfway mark. My favourite parts are the ones more grounded in reality. His time at Voila, his first marriage, having a daughter with Irina. These were the most tender and touching moments. I also liked the exposition on higher-dimensions (no one’s surprised there) and how it relates to the prison story and Ispas’ disappearance. I liked the rumination about dreams (not the dream journals). I liked the part with the mites world, it was gnarly and disgusting and thoroughly fascinating. 

 

Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu is a fantastic writer. The way he weaves sentences together and pull metaphors out of thin air is exemplary. Sean Cotter also deserves massive credit for his translation. The narration flowed beautifully and no word felt out of place. I’ll have a hard time choosing which highlighted bits to add here. 

 

“My bed turned into an archaeological site, where, in the impossible shape of a crushed being, lay the yellow and porous bones of a lost animal.”

“My meagre memory, rent and consumed by misfortune’s flames.”

“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?”

“They often wrote too affectedly and poorly, but they knew how to capture, like a flame rising from the wet wood, the grand light of dreams.”

“I’ve asked myself many times what belief without doubt could be, the faith that could move mountains, the one that knows that all is possible. What it’s like to pray for something and have the complete assurance your prayer will be accepted.”

“While the new Irina takes flight, proficient even from the first beats of her wings, I will remain beside the empty shell of the old Irina, as moving as a mutilated statue, until, inevitably, the wind scatters her being.” 

 

Solenoid is a book I willingly admit is not for me. Maybe when I’m older I can come back to these pages and see the follies of my youth. When the right amount of little grey cells get into my noggin I might finally understand. 

Oh but who am I kidding, I can't go through that all over again.