Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu Reviewed by Sarah Kornfeld

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu 

Translated by Sean Cotter
Deep Vellum Publishing
October 25, 2022
672 Pages
ISBN 9781646052028

Reviewed by Sarah Kornfeld

The Haunting Magic of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

Mircea Cărtărescu is considered to be the great contemporary writer of Romania, and with his new work, Solenoid (beautifully translated by Sean Cotter) we are provided an insight into why. Though one must enter into his world carefully, and for western readers with some understanding of the context for his brilliant, claustrophobic, and driving narrative: we are being invited into how the mind adapts, liberates or stays trapped in the history of and continued reality of nationalistic dictatorship. Cărtărescu is not just an important writer of Eastern Europe, he is a linguist for the mind’s response to oppression, and in this way, his work is crucial for all of us living in the specter of democracy’s demise. Though, it is his brilliant, clear and disquieting prose that fills you quite immediately with a desire to explore a world that seems to be collapsing, slowly, and with such sharp clarity, you simply can’t stop reading.

It would be easy to say that Cărtărescu’s work is Kafkaesque. That would be a simple way for an American to experience his writing. Spooky. Slightly disconnected. Violently observant. Though, to understand what makes this different from Kafka is to understand the Romanian language, a language that is latin-based, though employs a deep integration of Slavic, Turkish, and a myriad of other cultures that weave through it. The preeminent translator of Romanian in the United States, Sean Cotter, has done what seems like the impossible, to translate Romanian into an English that still feels uniquely Romanian. The sentences hold the unique, languorous quality of Romanian (and Romanians) and seem to lilt between the absurd and the abstract in long, beautiful paragraphs. What Cotter has done for us is provide the feeling of Romania, its tempo (slow), and the thoughts of its people (fast) bound up in a discordant and circular way of thinking about freedom – every detail of life is presented in the text, every moment is seen as deeply interesting while also disappearing into nothingness. This unique quality, to be “in the moment” while also knowing nothing will ever last is one of the driving subtexts of Romanian art, and this book, and this translation, is a gorgeous gift to those of us who long to understand how to be free.

It might also be easy to categorize this writing as Magical Realism. That would be incorrect of us as well, for in Romania there has been a desire to reclaim reality after the “fall” of communism in 1989. Magical Realism was used during communism to use the fantastical and encode it with truth – artists were compelled to develop visual languages (in all art forms) and use this structure as a form of rebellion, allowing the poetic and satirical to share the truth of the horrors of totalitarianism. Cărtărescu is doing something different, he is a poet who is using language as a catalyst for describing the absurd world around us, around himself, and I would prefer to honor his work by defining it as an advanced form of Magical Realism, that of Romanian Realism. This is of course tongue in cheek, for Romanians love to question what is real, though this is the very point, that nothing is real, and that language is the only way to capture that fact.

Solenoid begins with lice. How they feel, how it smells to get rid of them, how they crawl into the hair of the main character and take over his life. And then there is a matter of the string that the main character pulls from his navel in the bath. It, filled with the memory of childhood, is now a piece of his body that is looking to escape in the water. This narrator, a person who is a teacher (having failed as a writer), invaded by lice, thinking back on a life that seems to be gone by too soon, speaks so immediately that you feel the weight of having met him past his prime. The body as work, the body as memory, the body as invaded by parasites, this is the framework and the subtext; the language of the seen and unseen that Cărtărescu offers us like an edgy gift. 

When describing the lice in the sink, Cărtărescu also describes the reality of the specific world of the underground, “They have eyes that see the same reality, they have legs that take them through the same unending and unintelligible world. They want to live, just as I do. I wash them off the sides of the sink with a stream of water. They travel through the pipes below, into the sewers underground.” The language of this paragraph is a gorgeous map to the layers of dirt and longing, and the connection all creatures have in Romania, touched by the “unintelligible world” of political and social disconnection.

The body of the author also takes on its own life, his hands move at their own accord without his control, another point of proof that being human is a journey that must be observed as the absurd, “Only later does the fear come, only after this fantasy (that happens about once every two or three months) becomes a kind of memory do I begin to wonder if somehow, among all the anomalies of my life—because this is my topic—the fantastical independence of my hands is further proof that . . . everything is a dream, that my entire life is oneiric, or something sadder, graver, weirder, yet truer than any story that could ever be invented…” As the book continues the writer explores his inability to write and questions its value (or his own) and through his inner monolog the very nature of the Romanian language is longed for, particularly now as the concern for the language’s demise comes front and center as Romanians adopt English and are forgetting their native genius. “This was the city I saw from my window on Ştefan cel Mare, and the one, if I had become a writer, I would have described endlessly, page after page and book after book, empty of people but full of myself, like a network of arcades in the epidermis of some god, inhabited by a sole, microscopic mite, a transparent creature with strands of hair at the end of its hideous, stumpy legs.”

Fastidious, wrenching, wild, the words of Cărtărescu blind the page with a freedom we may have lost in the west. He is not writing to be a part of any school, fine arts program, market – his voice is the deep scream of the writer compelled to tell the truth, out of anyone else’s form, and his glorious defiance is as much art as his words.

Mircea Cărtărescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter’s English translation.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T.O. Bobe’s Curl and Nichita Stănescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. His translation of Magda Cârneci’s FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021. 

Sarah Kornfeld is an American author, playwright, and producer. Sarah explores themes of love, trauma, and exile in artists and families in fiction, non-fiction, and cultural research. Her most recent narrative non-fiction book, THE TRUE is published by Editura Integral out of Bucharest, and was launched at the National Theater Festival of Bucharest/UNITER in November of 2021 to excellent praise including Rain Taxi. The True was also selected for the 2021 LibFest / Libris Literary Festival in Bucharest. Her debut novel, WHAT STELLA SEES was published in 2018. Her writing has been featured in independent literary journals including Vol.1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy, and Heavy Feather Review.  Her writing on The Creative Economy has been profiled in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kornfeld received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and received professional training at the Royal Court Theater in London.

14 December 2022