Like Borges’s Buenos Aires or Kafka’s Prague, the Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu’s Bucharest is a city at once concrete and dreamlike. This isn’t a paradox so much as an opportunity to display the fluent linkages of a prodigious imagination. “Solenoid,” Cartarescu’s latest novel to appear in English, is grounded in the gritty milieu of the Romanian capital in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It is the journal-cum-antinovel of a schoolteacher reflecting on his youth, his mother, his job, his disturbing dreams and his overwhelming intuition that the anomalies of his life constitute an inscrutable pattern.
The narrator puzzles over talismans from the past — a Tic-Tac box of his baby teeth, bleached photographs, the plaits his mother made him wear as a child — while contemplating the solenoids he discovers around the city. (A solenoid is a kind of electromagnet.) Each of the massive, subterranean coils offers a point of departure from reality. The magnet beneath the narrator’s own home allows him to float in his bed while he sleeps, for instance; another allows him to inhabit the unfathomable existence of a mite burrowed beneath a librarian’s skin. Oscillating between mundanity and metaphysical terror, the bleak, foundering edifice of Communist-era Bucharest trembles with possibility. This braiding of realism, hallucination, myth and dream creates the distinctive pleasures and unruly challenges of Cartarescu’s baroque fictions.
But even given its penchant for the cerebral and the arcane — there are chapter-length digressions on the fourth dimension, dream cults, the Voynich Manuscript, abstruse mathematics and much else besides — “Solenoid” can perhaps most fruitfully be read as a surrealist detective novel, albeit one of vast, existential dimension. The narrator seeks an escape from the riddle of life through “the illumination of certain subterranean connections.” He practices a sweeping solipsism that makes of paranoia a kind of totalizing faith. Every event, image or experience, whether common or outlandish, throbs with sinister meaning. Objects and memories from childhood bloom with late, apocalyptic significance in adulthood. Dreams contain legible clues for the arresting puzzles of waking life. This is the world as pure conspiracy, a web of impossibly esoteric interconnection. The book’s maximalism is no mere formalist tic, then, but a matter of necessity. Only a novel so sprawling, so unexpected, so incongruous could house such a sublime neurosis.
What is it like to read “Solenoid”? Narrative gloss does no justice to the novel’s strangeness, its sense of otherworldly hazard, its hypnagogic menace and navel-gazing decadence. Scenes of utter banality — the small talk of a teacher’s lounge, a walk home from work — alternate with phantasmagoric set pieces. An obsidian statue stomps the prophet of an anti-death protest group. A giantess sleeps beneath an abandoned factory. A cryptic automaton lords over a children’s sanitarium. Tubes run beneath Bucharest to harvest human pain in a balloon of translucent skin. These extraordinary occurrences are treated as anything but. Nothing in the author’s tone suggests we’ve entered the zone of imagination or fantasy. There is a feeling that anything at all might happen.
“Solenoid” is an instant classic of literary body horror. It is divinely, wondrously gross. (Sean Cotter’s translation, excellent throughout, is especially good in its technical vocabulary, rendering the stuff of the body with a mad anatomist’s glee.) From its opening lines, the novel highlights the odious amid the mundane: “I have lice, again. It doesn’t surprise me anymore, doesn’t disgust me. It just itches. I find nits constantly, I pull them off in the bathroom when I comb my hair: little ivory eggs, glistening darkly against the porcelain around the faucet.”
Beyond that, there are luxuriously detailed passages on humanoid larvae, parasitological treatises, skittering beetles, bulging clavicles, glistening secretions and the removal of dark twine from the narrator’s navel. Cartarescu’s world is awash with private fluids, which he never tires of describing with the thickest and wettest adjectives possible: “amniotic,” “cerebrospinal,” “ectoplasmic,” “gelatinous” and so on. Not for a moment are we allowed to forget the heaving mound of flesh we inhabit, the sweaty impedimenta surrounding the jewel of consciousness. This agonized sense of duality is a primary motivator for the narrator’s attempted escape. The body becomes one of the novel’s primary settings, a jail from which the mind longs to slip free.
“Solenoid,” too, is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist’s cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of García Márquez and Bruno Schulz’s labyrinths are all recognizable in Cartarescu’s anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel’s sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature — “No novel ever gave us a path; all of them, absolutely all of them sink back into the useless void of literature” — he also affirms the possibility inherent in the “bitter and incomprehensible books” he idolizes. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of “Solenoid” itself.
Despite the novel’s immense pessimism and relentlessly experimental nature, the book ends on a note of domestic peace, as if Cartarescu wished to claim his own slanted version of “happily ever after.” As an apocalyptic event descends upon Bucharest — the city ascends to the sky to reveal the macabre subterranean workings of a nameless demonic civilization — the narrator, his lover and their infant daughter retire to a ruined chapel in an oak grove. “There within its rickety, fresco-colored walls, we will grow old together,” he writes.
Happiness in “Solenoid”? Well, of a kind. In the end, the illusion of deliverance, forged in the remarkable alloy of literature and life, can be just as freeing as the real thing: “I have so often felt — in those moments I never thought I would experience — that I did escape in the end, that I flew through all dimensions in an unexpected escape from self.”
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