Richard Thompson's Reviews > Solenoid

There is much brilliance in this book. It is part of a tradition of Eastern European weirdness that stretches from Gogol through Kafka and beyond. There is something about that part of the world that lets some of its writers perceive reality in wonderful and unusual ways. Sometimes the mundane becomes threatening when seen this way, but the threat is mitigated by humor and a sort of petty awe that comes from looking at familiar things in a new way.

Beyond Eastern Europe, I found an even greater connection here to Pessoa's Book of Disquiet and Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon and All the Names, though they are not mentioned in Mr. Cărtărescu's many literary references. The narrator in Solenoid as in the other books has a profession that he feels is beneath him. He writes for himself and lives mostly inside of his head where he has flights of fancy that let him alternately soar and crash. His writings contain observations that are sometimes wise and sometimes not quite right, as can be expected when a smart person works in isolation. And the other characters are mostly just the narrator's puppets, though in Solenoid that part changes at the end.

The most striking thing for me about the writing in Solenoid is the near constant sense of estrangement, which is accomplished in several different ways — by looking at tiny things with great magnification or by describing the world from the point of view of a child, a dreamer or a sick person. Every way you turn leads to a new hallucinatory experience that creates an ongoing sense of disquiet. And then there are actual weird things that are presented in the world of the book not as magic, but as having some material basis in the world - the narrator's odd house, the giant solenoids buried in strategic locations around Bucharest, the strange creatures that seem to live under the floor in the tower of the narrator's house.

But I thought that the book was much too long. The cognitive dissonance that it creates is uncomfortable and seems to be lacking in direction for the first three quarters of the book. Loose ends are tied up in the final quarter, but I felt that the last part went off the rails in two opposite ways. In the first place, too many of the odd things become objectively odd. I liked it better when they were presented as products of the narrator's perspective or imagination or as the mental distortions of dreams or illness. When the material world begins to misbehave outside of the narrator's head, it did not did not seem to flow naturally from the world's illogic, but to violate the principle of internality. And then in the second place, the mundane world is tied up in too neat a package at the end. The narrator comes out of himself and begins to relate more normally to the people around him, to perhaps even be finding happiness in his life. Again, that felt bolted on to me, not a logical development of personal growth and redemption, but an inversion of the world of the book that was not fully true to the narrator's personality.

Still, the faults are minor in comparison with the parts that are brilliant. Maybe I was just exhausted, by the time I got to the end. It is a book that would bear rereading, and I might see it differently the second time through.