I picked up this book, mainly because Celine Nguyen from Substack (popular for writing “Research as a Leisure activity”). In fact the very reason I’m writing this long-winded book review of what I read this month was partly because of the way she went into the deep ends of literature, and coming back with these monthly deep dives in the “What I read” format. So when she really really recommended Cartarescu’s Solenoid, I didn’t flinch even, I just wanted to read this right away.
This book is quite an anti-plot plot. It screams a dozen ideas at the same time, and at certain junctions it’s very bizzare too. Compared to reading Julia Galef’s Scout Mindset, this was quite the opposite, it didn’t want to get to an answer soon, the writer just wanted to linger with the problem space, where more questions lead to even more questions. And yes, no need to answer all these questions, they can wait. That was the impression and smell I could get.
There is a lot of Romanian history, and it also quickly explores outward into European and World History. The story starts with a school teacher in first person narrative, reflecting on his disappointing life, slowly talking about things with his diary, and eventually ending up with interrogating the big questions in history (even Tesla makes a surprise appearance)
Similar to how Kafka in Metamorphosis starts with that of a bug, Cartarescu starts with the story of lice. This sets the premise through a solid visceral opening, and there is a lot of descriptive imagery throughout the prose. The socialist themes are indicated in various ways. I particularly noticed the numericals. Bus 88, School 86, Sector 37, etc which is a vestigial influence of the Soviets.
That fall, a luminous fall like no other I can remember, I went to the university for the first time. When bus 88 crossed Zoia Kosmodemianskaia toward Batiştei, I was bubbling with happiness like champagne: I was a college student, something I had never dared to dream, a student of Letters! From now on, I would see the center of Bucharest every day, what seemed to me at the time the most beautiful city in the world. I would live in the splendor of the city that unfurled, like a peacock, its Intercontinental Hotel and National Theater, its university and Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture, its Cantacuzino Hospital and four ministering statues behind it, with hypnotic eyes of churning waters. Gossamer cobwebs drifted through the air, young women rushed toward their studies, the world was new and warm, just out of the oven, and it was all for me!
The writer talks about an alternate universe where his writing didn’t succeed, in a dystopian soviet-style universe.
Different than all the writers of the world, precisely because I am not a writer, I feel I have something to say. And I will say it poorly and truthfully, the way anything worth putting down on paper should be said. I often think that this is what should have happened: for me to be taken apart in that far-off night at the workshop, to completely withdraw from any literary space, to be a Romanian teacher in an elementary school, the most obscure person on Earth. See me writing now, writing just the text that—as I read those sophisticated and powerful and smart and coherent books, full of madness and wisdom—I always imagined and never found anywhere: a text outside the museum of literature, a real door scrawled onto the air, one I hope will let me truly escape my own cranium. A text that he—the one giving autographs and meetings with teachers and who knows what in other countries—never dreamed of.
