Staff Pick
Solenoid
by Mircea Cartarescu & Sean Cotter (translator)
AUCK IN STOCK
WGTN IN STOCK
Pages:
640
Published:
4 Mar 2025
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Pushkin Press, Limited
ISBN:
9781805333197
Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a teacher, Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life and spirals into an existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics. Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, it grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths.
In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.
In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.
$33.00
Our protagonist, a school teacher in communist era Romania, navigates day-to-day sur-reality, an "anti-Narnia" composed of strange and horrific intensifications of the familiar. A book which harrows the soul to see what beauty might be sown amidst the furrows.
Tony, Unity Books wellington
