![]() ![]() (A solenoid is a kind of electromagnet.) Each of the massive, subterranean coils offers a point of departure from reality. 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. 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. “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. ![]() This isn’t a paradox so much as an opportunity to display the fluent linkages of a prodigious imagination. Like Borges’s Buenos Aires or Kafka’s Prague, the Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu’s Bucharest is a city at once concrete and dreamlike. SOLENOID, by Mircea Cartarescu | Translated by Sean Cotter ![]()
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