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1. A spider's history of love LCCN 2020941783 Type of material Book Personal name Cărtărescu, Mircea, author. Main title A spider's history of love / Mircea Cărtărescu ; translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin [and seven others] Published/Produced New York : New Meridian Arts, 2020. Description 127 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781734383522 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PC840.13.A86 S65 2020 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

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  Mircea Cărtărescu

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Mircea Cărtărescu
  Mircea Cărtărescu, 2024
  Mircea Cărtărescu, 2024
  Born 1 June 1956 (age 68)
  Bucharest, Romania
  Occupation Novelist, poet, short-story writer, essayist, journalist, university professor
  Alma mater University of Bucharest
  Literary movement 80s Generation, Blue Jeans Generation, Postmodernism
  Years active 1978–present
  Spouse Ioana Nicolaie [ro]
  Academic work
  Institutions University of Bucharest
  Mircea Cărtărescu (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈmirtʃe̯a kərtəˈresku]; born 1 June 1956[1]) is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic, and essayist.[2]

  Biography
  Born in Bucharest in 1956, he attended Cantemir Vodă National College during the early 1970s. During his school years, he was a member of literary groups led by Nicolae Manolescu and Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu. At that time, along with many teenagers of his generation, Cărtărescu was tremendously influenced by the legacy of the 1960s American counterculture, including artists such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors. He commenced writing poetry in 1978.

  Later, he studied at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language and Literature. He graduated in 1980 with a thesis that later became his book on poetry, more specifically The Chimaeric Dream. That same year, some of his works were published by Cartea Românească.

  Between 1980 and 1989, Cărtărescu worked as a Romanian language teacher,[3] then worked at the Writers' Union of Romania and as an editor at Caiete Critice magazine. In 1991, he became a lecturer at the Chair of Romanian Literary History, part of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters. As of 2010, he was an associate professor there, where he still lectures to this date.[4] Between 1994 and 1995, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and currently holds the same position at the University of Stuttgart. In 2012, he received the International Literature Award for his novel The Body.

  Cărtărescu is married to the Romanian poet Ioana Nicolaie [ro], with whom he has a son.[5] He is a full professor at the University of Bucharest within the Department of Literary Studies.[6]

  Work
  His debut as a writer was in 1978 with poetry published in România Literară magazine. Two years later, he published his first book, Faruri, vitrine, fotografii, which earned him the Romanian Writers' Union award for debut.[7] The post-modern epic poem The Levant appeared in 1990, written at a time of heavy censorship by the communist regime, without much hope of being translated, and published after the fall of communism, it is a parody that encompasses writing styles touching on several other Romanian writers, most notably Mihai Eminescu, from whose poem, "Scrisoarea III", he borrowed the metrical pattern and even some lines.[8]

  In 2010, Blinding was voted novel of the decade by Romanian literary critics.[9]

  His works have been translated into most European languages (including Spanish, French and English) and published in Europe, Hispanic America, and the United States.[10]

  Cărtărescu has been rumoured to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, and has been considered one of the favorites to win the award.[11][a] In 2023, when Swedish journalist Carsten Palmer Schale had included him on a short list of favourites for the award,[12] Cărtărescu himself said that he is thankful for being included in such a list, and that he doesn't wish for anything more.[13]

  Poetry
  Faruri, vitrine, fotografii..., ("Headlights, shop windows, photographs...") Cartea Românească, 1980 – Writers Union Prize for debut, 1980
  Poeme de amor ("Love Poems"), Cartea Românească, 1982
  Totul ("Everything"), Cartea Românească, 1984
  Levantul (The Levant), Cartea Românească, 1990 – Writers Union Prize, 1990, republished by Humanitas in 1998
  Dragostea ("Love"), Humanitas, 1994
  50 de sonete de Mircea Cărtărescu cu cincizeci de desene de Tudor Jebeleanu ("50 Sonnets by Mircea Cărtărescu With Fifty Drawings by Tudor Jebeleanu"), Brumar 2003
  Nimic, Poeme (1988–1992) ("Nothing, Poems, 1988-1992"), Humanitas, 2010
  Nu striga niciodată ajutor ("Never Call For Help"), Humanitas, 2020
  Prose
  Desant '83 (Cartea Românească, 1983)
  Visul (Cartea Românească, 1989). The Dream
  Nostalgia (Humanitas, 1993; full edition of Visul). Trans. Julian Semilian (New Directions, 2005; ISBN 0-8112-1588-1), with introduction by Andrei Codrescu
  Travesti (Humanitas, 1994)
  Orbitor, vol. 1, Aripa stângă (Humanitas, 1996). Blinding, Book One: The Left Wing, trans. Sean Cotter (Archipelago Books, 2013)
  Jurnal (Humanitas, 2001). 2nd ed.: Jurnal I, 1990–1996 (Humanitas, 2005, ISBN 973-50-0985-4)
  Orbitor, vol. 2, Corpul (Humanitas, 2002). Blinding, Book Two: The Body
  Enciclopedia zmeilor (Humanitas, 2002). The Encyclopedia of Dragons
  De ce iubim femeile (Humanitas, 2004). Why We Love Women, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth (University of Plymouth Press, 2011; ISBN 1841022063)
  Jurnal II, 1997–2003 (Humanitas, 2005). Diary II, 1997–2003
  Orbitor, vol. 3, Aripa dreaptă (Humanitas, 2007). Blinding, Book Three: The Right Wing
  Frumoasele străine (Humanitas, 2010). Beautiful Strangers
  Zen, Jurnal 2004-2010 (Humanitas, 2011). Zen, Diary 2004-2010
  Solenoid (Humanitas, 2015). Trans. Sean Cotter (Deep Vellum, 2022)
  Un om care scrie, Jurnal 2011-2017 (Humanitas, 2018). A Man Who Writes, Diary 2011-2017
  Melancolie (Humanitas, 2019). Melancholy
  Theodoros (Humanitas, 2022). Theodoros
  Essays
  Visul chimeric (subteranele poeziei eminesciene) ("Chimerical Dream – The Underground of Eminescu's Poetry"), Litera, 1991
  Postmodernismul românesc ("Romanian Postmodernism"), Ph.D. thesis, Humanitas, 1999
  Pururi tânăr, înfășurat în pixeli ("Forever Young, Wrapped in Pixels"), Humanitas, 2003
  Baroane! ("You Baron!"), Humanitas, 2005
  Ochiul căprui al dragostei noastre ("Our Love's Hazel Eye"), Humanitas, 2012
  Peisaj după isterie ("Landscape, After Histrionics"), Humanitas, 2017
  Creionul de tâmplărie ("A Carpenter's Pencil"), Humanitas, 2020
  Audiobooks
  Parfumul aspru al ficțiunii ("The Rough Fragrance of Fiction"), Humanitas, 2003
  Anthologies
  Testament – Anthology of Modern Romanian Verse (1850–2015) second edition – bilingual version English/Romanian. Daniel Ioniță – editor and principal translator, with Eva Foster, Daniel Reynaud and Rochelle Bews. Minerva Publishing House. Bucharest 2015. ISBN 978-973-21-1006-5
  Awards and honours
  1980: Romanian Writers' Union Prize
  1989: Romanian Academy's Prize, for Visul
  1990: Romanian Writer's Unions Prize, Flacăra magazine Prize, Ateneu magazine Prize, Tomis magazine Prize, Cuvântul magazine Prize
  1992: Le Rêve nominee for: Prix Médicis, Prix Union Latine, Le meilleur livre étranger
  1994: Romanian Writer's Union Prize, ASPRO Prize, Moldavian Writers' Union Prize, for Travesti
  1996: ASPRO Prize, Flacăra magazine Prize, Ateneu magazine Prize, Tomis magazine Prize, Cuvântul magazine Prize
  1997: Flacăra magazine Prize, Ateneu magazine Prize, Tomis magazine Prize, Cuvântul magazine Prize
  1999: Orbitor's French translation nominee for Prix Union Latine
  2000: Romanian Writers Association Prize
  2002: ASPRO Prize, AER Prize
  2006: Grand Officer of the Cultural Merit Order (Ordinul "Meritul cultural" în grad de mare ofițer), awarded by Romanian Presidency
  2011: Vilenica Prize
  2012: International literatur prize "Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2012", Berlin[14]
  2013: Spycher – Literary Prize Leuk, Switzerland[15]
  2013: Grand Prix of the Novi Sad International Poetry Festival[16]
  2014: Best Translated Book Award, shortlisted for Blinding, translated from the Romanian into English by Sean Cotter[17]
  2014: Premio Euskadi de Plata to the Best Book of 2014 for Las Bellas Extranjeras (Frumoasele străine), translated from the Romanian into Spanish by Marian Ochoa de Eribe (Editorial Impedimenta)
  2015: Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding for Blinding[18]
  2015: Austrian State Prize for European Literature[19]
  2016: Premio Gregor von Rezzori for Blinding[20]
  2018: Thomas Mann Prize[21]
  2018: Prix Formentor[22]
  2022: FIL Award[23]
  2023: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Solenoid[24]
  2024: International Dublin Literary Award for Solenoid[25]

• The Untranslated - https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/mircea-cartarescus-interview-for-de-reactor-on-solenoid-mites-butterflies-kafka-untranslatability-censorship-a-paradise-in-ruins-and-his-latest-novel-theodoros/

  Mircea Cărtărescu’s Interview for De Reactor: On Solenoid, mites, butterflies, Kafka, untranslatability, censorship, a paradise in ruins, and his latest novel Theodoros
  Posted on October 6, 2022 by The Untranslated
  CartarescuPhoto

  I am honoured to publish on my blog the English original of the recent interview that Mircea Cărtărescu, one of my favourite living authors, has given to the Dutch-language platform for literary criticism De Reactor. Big thanks to the contributing writers Emiel Roothooft and Remo Verdickt for providing me with this great opportunity.

  Interviewers: In contemporary literary discourse, there’s a lot of talk about so-called autofiction. Would you yourself consider this book, with all of its surreal splendor, a work that is strongly autobiographical?

  SolenoidHumanitasMircea Cărtărescu : First, I have to try and remember this old book of mine because it was published seven or eight years ago. Since then, I have written six or seven other books. Now I’m going to release a new novel. I’m trying to remember and get myself back in the atmosphere of Solenoid, which is in my very modest career maybe the second most important book, following the trilogy called Orbitor ​​[of which the first part appeared in English as Blinding], which has also been published in Dutch, translated by the same translator, Jan Willem Bos, an excellent translator and a great friend of mine. That trilogy was in a way the aircraft carrier of my modest fleet or the most important ship in this fleet. Solenoid is another very, very important book for my career. Solenoid is a metaphysical book. The first thing that I have to say about it is that it’s metaphysical, it is a “vertical” book, directed to the skies.

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  Also, it is an ethical book, which is very much preoccupied with human destiny and with the distinction between good and evil. I think that is the biggest topic of this book, which in a way starts with a parable in one of Albert Camus’ stories ​​[The Artist at Work], where one of his characters is lying on his deathbed and pronounces his last word. The people around him cannot understand whether he says “solitaire” ​​[solitary] or “solidaire” ​​[solidary]. This is the dilemma: to be with people, to share the fate of people all over the world, or to be alone, to be aloof, to be only concerned about your work, about your goals, about your dreams.

  This is also the dilemma of the main character in Solenoid – a character with no name – who teaches at a high school on the outskirts of Bucharest and who dreams of becoming a writer. And just because he couldn’t become a normal and “banal” writer, he becomes a true writer. A writer similar to Franz Kafka, for example. A writer who doesn’t play the game, who writes only for himself, who writes not for the readers but for God. This character has always had this dilemma.

  He wants to be saved. He’s looking, in a metaphysical and theological way, for his salvation. When this salvation is offered through a portal in the walls of this world, but only to him, he realizes that he doesn’t want to be saved if the other people are not saved. So, he prefers to stay with his family, with his little daughter, with his friends, and lead the life of the “normal”, real people on this earth, rather than to be saved himself. This is a sort of message, if you want, the message of the whole novel. In this novel, I felt for the first time in my life what happened inside the human soul when one has to decide about one’s fate.

  Gabriel García Márquez has always been an important influence on your work. Is Solenoid, both in its very title and through its ultimate conclusion, a reversal of One Hundred Years of Solitude?

  SolenoidDutchYes, because in the end, it is about human solidarity. This is the last word, I would say, of this novel. What I am particularly proud of with this novel (which I see now like someone else’s novel because so much time has passed since I wrote it – in four and a half or five years, if I remember well) is its construction. I think Solenoid is one of the best-built stories that I’ve ever done, together with the short story REM from my first book of prose, Nostalgia. While REM was a long short story of over 150 pages with a very subtle construction, I would say that Solenoid is like a rocket with several stages.

  The first one is a book that could have been published completely separately. Before thinking of Solenoid, I had another idea: to write about my anomalies. So, the first 200 or 250 pages could have been published as another book called My Anomalies. In this part, I was mostly preoccupied with some things that have really happened to me and made me very nervous for many years, for my whole life actually, mainly in specific and very particular states of my mind, mainly in dreams. Some of my dreams were recurring dreams that kept coming my entire life. Other ones were lucid dreams that I could control. The other ones were absolutely fantastic and very coherent dreams.

  Because I’ve been writing a journal since I was seventeen years old, I’ve written down almost all the dreams that I’ve had during my lifetime. That means I can study them, I can classify them, I can find out what kind of dream appeared in my life at which stage of my life. Some of them were very powerful and constantly recurring between when I was fifteen and when I was twenty-five, some others after the age of twenty-five and so on. But some of them, three or four of them, were absolutely stunning for me. They actually determined some of my books. I use these dreams, which I have really dreamt, as skeletons for some of my writings. Many other anomalies of mine are also featured. For example, what I call “my visitors” – the people who appear at night in my character’s bedroom – could be seen for ten seconds, for instance, as very normal, very natural and real people, and then they dissipate. There are many other things that have sometimes made me feel special, feel different from other people. I’ve tried to hoard a lot of experiences of this kind – strange, fantastic, dream-like, oneiric experiences.

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  So, while writing this part of the book, I didn’t have the idea of writing a novel yet. I was writing a sort of study, a study of a clinical case, let’s say. But step by step, I kind of began to understand what these dreams were all about, what they signified, why I felt that they were so important to me. And I discovered that, actually, I was writing only the first stage of a bigger book, the stage where the fuel is, where the indistinct mass of matter was gathered for giving fuel and power to the other part of the novel, which I only started to write. At a certain moment, I understood that it was only the stem of my book and that after the stem some branches should follow.

  At the point where the branches will go in all directions, there’s this parable about a burning house. You can only save one thing from the house where you have a little baby and a masterpiece, a fantastic painting, a classical painting like Vermeer’s or Rembrandt’s, a masterpiece without a price. So, what would you do? What would you save, the baby or the wonderful work of art? When I wrote this part of my book – it was a dialogue between two characters in a school, two teachers – I myself didn’t know what I should answer. What would I do myself? I wasn’t sure. And I let them decide.

  To my surprise, to my very big surprise, my character chooses the baby all the time. His lover, a teacher of physics, plays the devil’s advocate and tries to break her friend’s argument. She says: “Okay, you saved the child, but what would you do if you knew that this child would become Adolf Hitler?” And he says, to my surprise, without preconception: “I would still choose the child.” “But what if you knew that that child would become a serial murderer, who brings a lot of pain into the world, a lot of tragedy?” And my character says: “I would still choose the baby.”

  Here I gave an answer to some other scenes of this kind in world literature. First, there’s Fyodor Dostoevsky, who, in his huge novel The Brothers Karamazov, wrote that scene with the Great Inquisitor. One of the characters, Alyosha, says that he cannot understand evil. If everybody would be happy and only one child be killed or tortured because of it, he couldn’t bear this, he would think the world was monstrous. The same thing happens to Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Castorp has a dream in the snow at that tuberculosis sanatorium on the mountain. He dreams of a temple where everybody is very happy, but under it, a child is being murdered. This was some kind of compensation in a continuous fight between good and evil.

  This topic reflects one of the most important questions in the world: Unde malum? Where does evil come from? It’s the most important philosophical and theological question. I try to answer it myself in Solenoid, which, in a way, is an ambitious novel about human fate. The choice of my character is absolutely important in the novel because it guides my character towards the end, where he decides that redemption should be for everybody, not only for some, not only for the good people but for absolutely everybody. Until everybody is saved you do not have permission to save yourself.

  Interesting. That sheds totally new light on the novel. As with Blinding, the novel reads like an ambiguous love letter to Romania’s capital, Bucharest. Would you say you feel less drawn to a contemporary Bucharest than to an earlier but lost version of it?

  When I was a young writer, I was jealous of the writers who had their own cities. Of Jorge Luis Borges who had Buenos Aires and always wrote about this fabulous city. Of Fyodor Dostoevsky who had Saint Petersburg. Of Lawrence Durrell who had Alexandria. Of course, James Joyce invented, in a way, a fabulous Dublin. I had in mind, by writing, to appropriate my own city. If I couldn’t find an interesting real city, I should invent it. So, in a way I recreated Bucharest, and, in another way, I invented it. If you come to Bucharest, you will very soon realize that it has little to do with its image in my novels. I’ve invented much of it. I tried to create a coherent image of, as I call it in my novel, “the saddest city in the world”, a city full of ruins, a city full of images of the old glory which is no more. I made Bucharest in my own image, in my own personality. I tried to transform it into some sort of alter ego or a twin brother. I projected myself on the very eclectic architecture of this city, which has several layers of history and architecture.

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  In this book, there’s the so-called architect of the city, who decides to build it from scratch. I had this idea that Bucharest should be torn down and rebuilt from scratch by an architect who is the opposite to the one who built Brasília, for example, also a city built from scratch by a great architect. The opposite because he decides to make a city already in ruins, already ruined, as if hundreds of years had passed over it. He says that the real interesting cities are the ruined ones because they are like human destiny because time destroys everyone because each and every human endeavor will end in nothingness. In the same way that children are very happy to play in the mud, human beings feel at ease among ruins.

  Piranesi-RuinsofBaths
  Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Ruins of the Antonine Baths, in Views of Rome. Image Source

  It’s interesting that when I was in Brussels, me and another writer were asked what paradise looked like for us. I said that my idea of paradise is a huge planet full of ruins – no inhabitants, but only houses, millions of houses in ruins. I would love to explore all of them, to get inside, to see the destroyed furniture, to see the bathrooms and the kitchens in ruins, to see everything covered with algae, with spider webs. Being able to explore this field of ruins would be, for me, fascinating and wonderful.

  So, Bucharest is not at all a real city in my books. Actually, it’s different in each book – each book draws a new image of Bucharest. It’s a state of mind and it’s a metaphor, a metaphor for my inner life.

  Speaking of metaphors, you often characterize the human condition as louse-like or mite-like, as the experience of a small insect or parasite. Is this more than a metaphor? Do humans and mites have fundamentally similar experiences?

  I have always been fascinated with insects, like Vladimir Nabokov himself. When I was in Harvard, I could visit his office. He stayed there for seven years, not as a professor of literature but as an entomologist dealing with butterflies. This was his specialty as a biologist. I saw thousands of butterflies prepared by Nabokov, and many of them have the names of his characters. There was a butterfly called Lolita, another one Humbert Humbert, and so on. Insects play a very important role in my novels for no other reason than that I’m fascinated with them.

  Nabokovs_butterflies
  Part of Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Image Source

  In my trilogy Orbitor the butterfly is the most important of them. Even its structure is in the shape of a butterfly – the right wing, the left wing and the body in the middle. It’s a huge butterfly, which I sometimes call a “flying cathedral”, at some other times “a mystical butterfly”. In Solenoid, which deals much more with the problem of evil, I chose the insect of the insects: mites, insects that cannot even be seen with our eyes. Still, they are very real. They are interesting in their monstrosity if you look at them under a microscope. And they cause a lot of diseases, like asthma and many others. If you consider that about a quarter of the weight of your pillow is made out of their bodies, it becomes very frightening.

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  In Solenoid, using a science fiction device, the main character is sent to the world of mites. He becomes a sort of messiah for the mites, a Jesus Christ, who finds himself in a very, very small and insignificant world, trying to save it, trying to bring them resurrection. But he’s killed, like Jesus Christ was killed, because of the misunderstanding between two civilizations, two ways of living where there is no bridge possible ​​(you cannot communicate with God, like a cat cannot communicate with you, for example). These are very different worlds and the problem here is the impossibility to communicate. Also, the spider, of course, is very important to me because if the butterfly is an angel – the spider is a devil. In exactly the middle of my trilogy, there is a fight between a tarantula and a big and beautiful butterfly in a terrarium.

  Orbitor’s triptych-like structure is itself modeled on that of the butterfly (the original Romanian titles are The Left Wing, The Body, and The Right Wing). Why did not all your foreign publishers retain that structure in their respective titles?

  It’s kind of a funny situation because I think Orbitor is translated into most of the important languages and in some of the less important languages, let’s say, although all languages are important. The strategy of my publishers was very different from country to country, from language to language. For example, my French publisher, Éditions Denoël, decided to consider the three novels as absolutely separate novels, without any hint that it’s a trilogy. So, they published it as three separate novels with fantasy titles. They never asked me if I agreed with it, and I was rather upset with how they treated my book. The titles had no real connection to what happened in those novels.

  Other publishers decided to use my Romanian title, “Orbitor”, which is very different from the English “orbiter”, because “orbitor” in Romanian means “mystical light”, or “the Tabor Light”, the light that Saint Paul meets on the way to Damascus when he’s struck by illumination from the skies. It’s the light of truth, the light of revelation. Some translators interpreted it in one way, some others in another way, but I think “blinding” or “abbacinante” in Italian reflects better what I meant by this title. In Romanian, it’s very beautiful by the way, because “or-bit-or” has “or” at both ends, which means “gold” in French, and “bit” in the middle, which makes me think of a microchip surrounded by golden threads.

  Orbitor-Aripa-stanga-20211 Orbitor-Corpul-20211 Orbitor-Aripa-dreapta-20211

  What we really admired about Solenoid, is how it succeeds in blending the so-called “novel of ideas” with a novel that is driven by sensory impressions. Do the big, metaphysical ideas come to you the same way as the sensory impressions? Is it the same way of writing or is it a different process?

  Now we’ve arrived at the problem of how I write and this, in my opinion, is very interesting because I don’t know any other writer who does that. I write by hand, without any plan, without a synopsis. My way of writing is a pure and continuous inspiration. Let’s say, today I’m in the middle of a novel and I have to write one page or two like every day. What I do is, I read the page I wrote on the previous day and I try to write in the same key, like a musician. On each and every page I have the chance to change everything, to change the meaning and the course of the novel.

  It’s madness to write like that, without knowing what you’re going to put on the next page. It’s like using a 3D printer to make a car, not by assembling all its parts, but by making the lights at the front of the car first, then the windscreen, then the seats, then the engine, everything up to the back of the car instead of making everything at once. I have to have enormous faith in what my mind can do because otherwise you cannot write like this. It’s writing like a poet, not like a prose writer.

  Of course, when you write this way you can fail very, very easily because on each and every page you have to decide your book’s trajectory. It’s as if there are crossroads everywhere, all demanding a decision. But here is the trick: it’s not you who decides but your mind. Your mind knows better than you do what it is going to do and where it wants to go. It’s like a horse running a race: the jockey doesn’t win the race – the race is won by the horse. The jockey should be very small, very light, and should only touch the horse in very few places. The ideal would be that the jockey doesn’t touch the horse at all, that he just flies above it. It’s your horse, your mind that wins the race, not you. You are the small person that guides the horse, nothing else.

  So, I usually let my mind work. I do not touch my book but let it flow in every direction, wherever it wants to go. I’m only the portal, the medium, nothing but the voice of someone inside, and it is this person who actually dictates this book. Sometimes, it feels as if the text is already written on the page and I only remove the white stripes that cover the words. I just erase them and let the text appear.

  Do you create your prose and your poetry in the same way? We’re particularly interested in hearing about your work Levantul, one long poem about the history of Romanian poetry and which you have described as untranslatable.

  LevantulCoverYou might remember a certain episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses that’s called The Oxen of the Sun. It takes place in a maternity ward and some medical students are talking, eating sardines, while in the other room a woman is giving birth to a child. Joyce decided to use all the stages of the English language in this chapter, from the first ecclesiastical books to the slang of the people in the Bronx or Harlem in his own time. Levantul is quite the same. It is an Alexandrine poem of 7,000 lines, two hundred pages of nothing but poetry, which reconstructs the whole history of Romanian poetry, starting from seventeenth-century poets, up until the present day. This is why this book is actually untranslatable. You cannot translate it for people who have no idea about Romanian poetry and its history.

  It’s one of my very best books, maybe the best thing that I ever wrote. In my country it’s a classic, it’s in the schoolbooks. But I have always been very sad about the untranslatability of this book, so at a certain moment, I decided to do something quite crazy: to translate it into Romanian myself because many people in Romania can’t read it – it’s written in the language of old poetry. So, I re-translated it into contemporary Romanian, letting out the frequent quotations and literary allusions, and keeping only the plot and stories. In the prose version of The Levant, I kept only the adventures, the many interesting stories that appeared in the text, love stories, stories with pirates… Everything is presented in an ironic, sarcastic, and humoristic fashion.

  I gave this version of The Levant to all my translators and I asked them: “Can you do this book in your language?” And four of them answered: “Yes. It’s worth trying at least.” And they started to work and they were very happy to be challenged like that and they recreated their own “Levant”, not only in their own language but in their own culture, their own literature, the history of their own poetry. So now we have a version in Spanish, one in French, one in Swedish, and one in Italian. All of them are very different. It’s like translating mutatis mutandis, it’s like translating Finnegan’s Wake. If you translate it in ten languages, you’ll have ten new books because that book is untranslatable.

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  We’ll have to go for the French version then.

  It’s a very nice version, the French one.

  Or maybe push your friend Jan Willem Bos to translate it into Dutch. Try harder, Jan Willem!

  He will be happy to, but the problem for Dutch and other languages too is that it’s hard to find a publisher. It’s hard to find a publisher for books that are pure art and are not commercial. They do not guarantee to sell very well, and so on. I always had this problem in The Netherlands, but luckily one of the best publishers there, De Bezige Bij, had the courage to publish two of my very big and, from a commercial point of view, very risky books. I’m extremely grateful to them.

  From the very start, your work has been subjected to external alterations. Wasn’t it the Ceaușescu regime that originally forced you to change the title of Nostalgia to The Dream?

  Nostalgia1993Well, it would have been very nice if only my title had been changed, but actually… Nostalgia came out in 1989 when we were still in a dictatorship in my country. There were four months left until the Romanian Revolution happened. Being in a dictatorship, there was official censorship, so my book had to be censored, or rather, had to be mutilated by the censorship. It was published with one of the five original stories eliminated from the book, and with many other passages, tens of pages, eliminated from the other stories that remained in the book.

  Which story was left out, was it The Architect?

  VisulCoverIt was The Architect, you are right. And this happened because the censors were very sensitive about all the things that from their point of view could be seen as allusions to the president, to the political life and so on. Since by that time Ceaușescu was destroying villages all across Romania, he was ironically called “the architect”. Hence my eponymous story was eliminated. The title of the book has an interesting story as well. The original title was indeed Nostalgia (editors’ note: later editions would re-instate both this title and the banned story The Architect), but in 1989 they changed this into The Dream because by that time the great Russian movie director Andrei Tarkovsky had just defected to Italy, where he made his first movie while he was abroad, Nostalghia (1983). And because this film was banned in my country, like in Russia, like in many other countries from the east, I couldn’t use this title. So, they forced me to accept another title that I didn’t want to have. There were recurring instances of this kind of monstrous habit of censoring books by that time.

  What explains your interest in science? Have we lost a great scientist to a great writer?

  I always thought that being a writer is being not only a person who writes about love triangles or global warming, but it means that you should be a complete person. You should be somebody who cares about yourself and at the same time about the whole world around us. I think it’s about an inborn curiosity. I’m a curious person. I don’t just read literature, like many writers do. I read everything. And I don’t only read, I watch TV, YouTube, all of these viewing platforms. I watch everything I’m interested in and I’m interested in everything. Half of what I read is science, from mathematics to quantum physics, to biology, to medicine, to embryology – each and every field within my reach.

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  My publisher in Bucharest has a very good collection of science books, which is absolutely wonderful, and what I buy from my own publisher are not so much books of literature, but books of science. In the last years, I’ve been more and more interested in philosophy. It’s my new and very burning passion because I discovered that in order to be able to write – even novels, short stories, or poems – you should have some philosophical training. Now I’m very eager to read very difficult books, about the history of philosophy. I’m reading Kant and Descartes with much pleasure and I feel greatly enriched by their work. I read books from all fields, some of them not very easy to read. I read mathematics books, for example, though I cannot decipher an equation. I’m very interested in the history of mathematics, the personalities, Georg Cantor’s work… I’m an omnivorous reader.

  In Solenoid, there’s this sect that protests against death and everything else that’s bad about life. Did you think about anti-natalism and its prime Romanian proponent Emil Cioran when writing about them?

  Of course, I read some books by Cioran as he published his first books in Romanian. But I’m not very fond of him because of his political past. I totally disagree with his political ideas, which were right-wing, extremist, fascist ideas. This is why I am suspicious of everything he wrote. He was a very good writer, before being a very good philosopher, in my opinion. His works are absolutely wonderful as pieces of esthetic experience, but not of political or ideological experiences. He was a cynical writer. He was a sort of a new Schopenhauer, who actually was the exact opposite of what he argued for in his philosophy – he was a gourmand, a womanizer, or as we say, “he was burning the candle at both ends.” It’s quite the same with Cioran. He was the philosopher who was talking all the time about suicide, but he had no intention to commit suicide himself, it was all pure fancy.

  My picketers, the people who protest against death, madness, every evil of the human race, no, they have no connection to anything. I just invented them. I started with Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”, which is the most important protest against death that I know. Starting from that and some texts I found in Herodotus, I started to imagine a group of people who do not protest against war, against economic issues, but against the fundamental evils of our race, of our species: death, madness, diseases, and so on.

  A very interesting thing is that now my characters really exist. Literature has changed life in a way. In Latin America – Colombia, Mexico and other countries – after I published Solenoid in Spanish, those piquetistas, as they call themselves, just appeared. Now they are a sort of group that do the same thing that my characters do in my novel. They have big signs and go in front of the hospitals where cancer patients have died, in front of the morgues, and so on. So, in a way, my novel – and I’m very astonished about it – created a new reality, which didn’t exist before it.

  We’ve read on your Facebook wall that these piquetistas were present at one of your events and that the police had to be involved?

  Yes. I don’t want to show off, but this really happened. When I had a reading in Colombia – it was like Beatlemania – the people just started to crowd me from all directions and I couldn’t breathe anymore. It was very scary for me but the people who were ensuring order there surrounded me and we started to run through the crowd to the exit of the book fair, about four hundred meters. We ran and a crowd of readers followed us. They all shouted: “Hey Mircea, we are here! Give us autographs! Sign our books!” I was about to die there, killed by my own readers. It was a very interesting but also scary episode, but I survived (laughs). I have now made preparations to go to Mexico as I have just received a big prize there (editors’ note: Premio Fil de Literatura). I just love Latin America, all of my visitors are enthusiastic about me.

  We’ve noticed that you’ve just finished another book, Theodoros. We already know a little about it. It’s going to be a long book again. Can you tell us something? How did it turn out? Are you glad about it? What do you still have to do?

  TheodorosI’ve just started rereading it, which I still have to do as I finished it a few days ago. I will say that I’m satisfied with this book, which is a pseudo-historical book. It takes place in the nineteenth century and it’s about the life of a person who, being a simple servant at the court of a small aristocrat in Romania, had from a very early age this dream of becoming an emperor. As a child, all his games with other children were already marked by this dream, as he always played the role of the emperor and the other kids were his subjects. All his life, in everything he did, he wanted to reach higher and higher, to grow more and more. He even commits all kinds of evil things: robberies, piracy, and so on. None of this bothers him as he goes on with this very intense wish that he has. Finally, he succeeds and he becomes the emperor of Ethiopia in Africa. So, it’s a sort of picaresque novel about the fantastic and fabulous life of the character. It’s a work of imagination. It’s very different from either Orbitor or Solenoid. I would say that it is my “real” novel. It is my first novel that is really a novel, not a poem, not a metaphysical treatise, and so on.

  In Solenoid the narrator also says that he is writing an “anti-book.” Is that what your previous works were, “anti-novels”?

  (slight hesitation) Yes, in a way. But this one, which I have just finished and in a way am still finishing, is a real novel. It’s not an anti-novel. At the same time, it also has a kind of relativism to it, so it is also a kind of postmodern novel, full of irony and this distance, distances.

  To go back to the notion of anti-novel and Solenoid’s narrator’s preoccupation with Kafka, I’d like to finish up with this tiny passage about Hermana and Isachar: “The Dream Lord, great Isachar, sat in front of the mirror, his back close to the surface, his head bent far back and sunk deep in the mirror. Hermana, the Lord of Dusk, entered and dived into Isachar’s chest until he disappeared.” The narrator says this is the best thing Kafka ever did because he didn’t turn it into a story. Do you agree with the narrator in that respect? Is that the greatest achievement of literature, when it refuses to become “literature”?

  Franz_Kafka,_1923You are now talking about Franz Kafka. One of the most interesting things in discussing his work is that he wasn’t actually writing his diary, his journal, his short stories, his parables, his novels even, separately. He didn’t write his novels in a certain notebook and his short stories in another one. He wrote all of them in the notebooks where he wrote his journal. So, everything that he did was a single manuscript! He wrote a very long manuscript, including his novels, including his short stories, including his parables and so on, and integrating everything into his journal, his diary.

  We find there very short… let’s say stories, nuclei of stories. We have descriptions of dreams. We have parables that came to his mind and which were not finished. Sometimes, he started to write again and again on each of them. So, he didn’t want to produce books. He was only interested in the act of writing, in the process of writing. This episode with Hermana and many other episodes are in my opinion masterpieces in themselves. Even if you cannot say that they are real stories or real poems, etc. But they are extraordinary insights into his own soul, into his own absolutely dark and fantastic inner side.

  In that case, thank you, Mr. Cărtărescu, for this extraordinary voyage inside your dark and fantastic skull. Now, Jan Willem and Sean Cotter, let’s get cracking!

  The Interviewers:

  Emiel Roothooft, Research MA of Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium.

  Remo Verdickt, PhD in American Literature at KU Leuven, Belgium. Writes his doctoral thesis on James Baldwin.

Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu and American translator Sean Cotter have won the [euro]100,000 Dublin literary award for the novel Solenoid.

"By turns wildly inventive, philosophical and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little-known to English-language readers," said the judges.

"Cotter's translation of the novel sets out to change that situation, capturing the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cartarescu's work to an entirely new readership."

Solenoid was announced as the winning title at the International literature festival Dublin on Thursday. Cartarescu received [euro]75,000, while Cotter received [euro]25,000.

"Winning the Dublin literary award is one of the most significant achievements in my whole literary career, and a great honour for me," said Cartarescu.

Set in late 1970s and early 1980s communist Bucharest, Solenoid begins with the diaristic reflections of a schoolteacher and expands into an existential, surrealist account of the narrator's journey through different dimensions.

The prize "awards translators alongside authors, a choice as unusual as it is necessary", said Cotter. "I am honoured to be recognised with as great an author as Mircea, from as great a literature as the Romanian, and I hold in my heart the community of Romanian translators, all those who translate the world's smaller literatures, all those who translate."

Other books shortlisted for the award were Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, Haven by Emma Donoghue, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr and Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright.

The prize, sponsored by Dublin city council, is open to novels published in or translated to English. Solenoid is the first novel translated from Romanian to win the award since its inception in 1996.

Books are nominated by public libraries around the world -- this year, the longlist of 70 titles was nominated by 80 libraries from 35 countries. Solenoid was put forward by the Octavian Goga library in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

This year's judging panel was chaired by Trinity College Dublin professor Chris Morash, and featured poet and translator Ingunn Snaedal, writer Irenosen Okojie, writer and translator Anton Hur, American University of Paris professor Daniel Medin, and University College Dublin associate professor Lucy Collins.

On Wednesday, Pushkin Press acquired the rights to publish Solenoid in the UK and Ireland from US publisher Deep Vellum. Pushkin will publish a paperback of the novel on 6 June.

Previous winners of the award include Colm Tóibín, Valeria Luiselli, Anna Burns and Jim Crace. In 2023, Katja Oskamp and translator Jo Heinrich won the award for the novel Marzahn, Mon Amour.

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"[euro]100,000 Dublin literary award won by Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu; Cartarescu's novel Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, was described by judges as 'wildly inventive with passages of great beauty'." Guardian [London, England], 24 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795218366/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4cf08e99. Accessed 27 June 2024.

London: Dublin City Council, UK Government has issued the following news release:

Thursday 23rd May 2024: Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu and American translator Sean Cotter have been announced today as winners of the 2024 Dublin Literary Award, sponsored by Dublin City Council, for the novel Solenoid (published by Deep Vellum). The Award is the world's largest prize for a single novel published in English

Uniquely, the Award receives its nominations from public libraries around the world and recognises both writers and translators. Author Mircea Cartarescu receives EUR75,000 and Sean Cotter, as translator, receives EUR25,000. Solenoid is the 12th novel in translation to win the Dublin Literary Award.

The winning title was announced today at a special event, at International Literature Festival Dublin, which runs until 26th May. Lord Mayor and Patron of the Award, Daithi de Roiste made the announcement and Dublin City Librarian, Mairead Owens presented the prizes to the winning author and translator at the International Literature Festival Dublin Literary Village in Merrion Square Park.

Lord Mayor of Dublin Daithi de Roiste said "Solenoid illustrates the elasticity of human imagination where the reader is invited on a fantastical ride with a nameless anti-hero in Bucharest. Mircea Cartarescu and Sean Cotter deserve to win the Dublin Literary Award for this surreal masterpiece in the 21st century.

I'd like to congratulate them both and thank everyone involved in the award - writers, translators, librarians, publishers and the administrative staff of Dublin City Council."

"I am delighted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award winners. Solenoid, is the first novel translated from Romanian to win the award since its inception, 29 years ago," said Richard Shakespeare, Chief Executive, Dublin City Council. "This international award from a UNESCO City of literature, shows the commitment Dublin City Council and its libraries have to uniting readers and story makers across the world."

Nominated by "Octavian Goga" Cluj County Library in Romania, the winning novel was chosen from a shortlist of six novels by writers from Canada, Ireland, Australia and the United States.

The longlist of 70 titles was nominated by 80 libraries from 35 countries.

Winner Mircea Cartarescu commented that "Winning the Dublin Literary Award is one of the most significant achievements in my whole literary career, and a great honour for me. It shows an increase in my image as a writer in the English-speaking world after the publication of Solenoid, my breakthrough novel. I am grateful to the jury who chose my book from so many other wonderful ones."

American translator, Sean Cotter said "The Dublin Literary Award awards translators alongside authors, a choice as unusual as it is necessary. I am honored to be recognized with as great an author as Mircea, from as great a literature as the Romanian, and I hold in my heart the community of Romanian translators, all those who translate the world's smaller literatures, all those who translate."

Mircea Cartarescu and Sean Cotter will appear at the International Literature Festival Dublin, for an in-depth conversation about the novel, with Alex Clark, tomorrow evening (Friday 24th May) at 6pm in Merrion Square Park (Synge stage).

Book here to attend in person.

Copies of the winning title are available to borrow from Dublin City Libraries and from public libraries throughout Ireland. Readers can also borrow the winning novel on BorrowBox in eBook format. Further details about the Award and the winning novel are available on the Award website at www.dublinliteraryaward.ie

The 2024 Judging Panel, led by Professor Chris Morash of Trinity College Dublin, and includes Ingunn Snaedal, Daniel Medin, Lucy Collins, Anton Hur and Irenosen Okojie, commented:

"By turns wildly inventive, philosophical, and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little known to English-language readers. Sean Cotter's translation of the novel sets out to change that situation, capturing the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cartarescu's work to an entirely new readership."

Watch an interview/piece to camera with winning author Mircea Cartarescu.

Mircea Cartarescu 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 Stanescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. His translation of Magda Carneci's FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021.

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"Dublin City Council announces Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu translated by Sean Cotter as winner of the 2024 Dublin Literary Award." European Union News, 29 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795739939/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df271e13. Accessed 27 June 2024.

QUOTED: "a masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written."

Cartarescu, Mircea SOLENOID Deep Vellum (Fiction None) $22.00 10, 25 ISBN: 978-1-646052-02-8

A beguiling novel that plunges deep into subterranean conspiracy theories while questioning the nature of reality.

"You can't sow the world with dreams, because the world itself was a dream." The 27-year-old protagonist of Romanian novelist CÄrtÄrescu's waking-dream book is a teacher who has a decidedly Dostoyevskian discontentment with the world: He wanted to be a writer, but one particularly sharp-tongued critic, calling a poem of his "a pointless whirlpool of words," stopped his literary career in its tracks. Now, at the beginning of the novel, he finds himself battling the lice that are epidemic among his students. Parasites are much on his mind throughout this sprawling narrative. So, too, is death a constant preoccupation: Why should he, why should anyone, accumulate knowledge and experience only, in the end, to be annihilated? When not pondering the eternal void, the young man is suspended in a kind of nightly dream state courtesy of the titular solenoid that the previous owner of his house, a protégé of Nikola Tesla's who spent a long career inventing very strange things, not least of them this particular electromagnetic contraption, left behind, thanks to which, our narrator says, "I always slept aloft, floating between the bed and ceiling, occasionally turning over like a swimmer in a lazy, glittering light." It's not the only solenoid hidden away in the back alleys and tunnels of Bucharest, and one day the city itself will float away. Before then, however, our teacher and his girlfriend, a physics teacher smitten by theosophy, are drawn into the occult world of a group called the Picketists, condemned by the regime but capable of all kinds of mischief, whose members include a surprising number of people who figure in what passes for our teacher's ordinary life. CÄrtÄrescu writes poetically and philosophically ("What visceral and metaphysical mechanism converts the objective into the subjective?"), and while the story doesn't always add up, it's full of arresting images and eldritch twists that would do Umberto Eco proud.

A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written.

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"Cartarescu, Mircea: SOLENOID." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A721918142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8abf4933. Accessed 27 June 2024.

QUOTED: "Cartarescu attempts to rethink the categories through which we look at the world and at ourselves, and, in rethinking them, he becomes himself a link in the long chain of the world's great writers."
"This is one of those rare books you should have in your library because its shelf life will endure as long as literature lasts."

Mircea Cartarescu

Solenoid

Translated by Sean Cotter

Deep Vellum, 2022

Mircea Cartarescu and the Question of Literary Greatness

Wondering whether literary greatness was still possible, Susan Sontag identified it in the ambition of one's project and, as she put it, in a language that was free from "all undermining or undignified self-consciousness or irony."

Although characterized by Romanian critics as a "postmodernist writer," Mircea Cartarescu, Romania's greatest living novelist, lacks the type of self-conscious irony described above, which is one of the first things an American reader may notice when reading Solenoid. A corollary of such lack is that this type of writer is concerned with what one might call serious (or "ambitious," to use Sontag's term) existential themes, themes that have become obsolete in much of contemporary Western literature: the meaning of life, the terror of dying, the formation of the self, beauty as desire for the Absolute, literature as a door opened to the experience of the sacred. Solenoid is a novel about the search for, and the construction of, meaning, and its main theme is the narrator's (and, implicitly, the author's) mental landscape. A book is "a slot where [we can] look into another person's skull."

The novel's Tarkovskian title, which is reminiscent of Solaris by the famous Russian director, who was very popular in Communist Romania when Cartarescu came of age, opens the novel to a dimension that, as a genre, is that of speculative fiction. This dimension includes references to works dealing with physics, mysticism, numerology, the fascinating history of the Rubik's cube, Tesla--themes of interest to a certain type of Romanian writer from Cartarescu's generation, although in his case, they are grounded in a very diverse reading list from many fields of knowledge.

The solenoid, which, technically speaking, is an electrical coil of wire that acts as an electromagnet when carrying electric current, is compared to a mystical or a metaphysical engine--a metaphor for the possibility of escape from the ugliness of daily life into a dreamlike reality. It is no accident that Cartarescu chooses such a prosaic, industrial element as the mechanism that triggers the escape. The ugliness of the world he describes, that of communist Romania between the sixties and nineties, is the desolation of industrial wastelands, and it is only poetic justice that the homeopathic redemption from this ugliness should come from a solenoid. The same metaphor is also used to refer to the first novel that made an impression on his very young self, the Gadfly by Ethel Voynich.

Like the Warsaw of contemporary Polish writer Magdalena Tulli, Cartarescu's Bucharest is made of a visible face and an invisible one: the solenoids reside in the invisible world, but this hidden world allows its inhabitants to be free. The main quality of Cartarescu's solenoid is an effect of levitation, which occurs when the narrator is in his bedroom and makes love to his lover, Irina. His house, in the shape of a ship, is an infinite labyrinth--an image modeled on the Borgesian image of the infinite library. In other words: his house is his library (or, rather, the other way around). The narrator's house is on Maica Domnului Street (Our Lady Street, a street reminiscent of Mircea Eliade's "Mantuleasa Street"--a mythical story for the Romanian reader). This street where the narrator lives, and, in fact, Cartarescu's Bucharest as a whole--which is, in a way, the main character here--are of a Pasolinian ugliness, an ugliness that, just as in Pasolini, is an open door to the sacred.

My world is Bucharest, the saddest
city on the face of the earth, but at
the same time, the only true one.
[...] Bucharest is the product of a
gigantic mind; it appeared all at
once, the result of a single person's
attempt to produce the only city that
can say something about humanity.
Like Saint Petersburg and Brasilia,
Bucharest has no history, it only
mimics history. [...] The constructor
of Bucharest planned it all as it
appears today. [...] His genius was
to build a city already in ruin, the
only city where people should live.
A city of blind walls with bulging
bricks barely held in by rusty iron
bolts, of daft plaster ornamentation,
of antediluvian trams, of bugeaten
doorframes and decomposing
window frames, of unearthed paving
stones, of sad courtyards with
forgotten, unwatered oleanders
placed on time-worn stairs. [...] A
city of unplastered houses, of storefronts
with scarlet cupolas full of
wasp hives. Of neighborhoods with
clotheslines between houses and idiots
sitting on fences. ...
To compensate for its ruined palaces, Bucharest's architect (read "God") had the idea to give it--as a bonus--solenoids buried in the foundations of six houses, one above the morgue, and five others in various points of the city's outskirts, all in dilapidated neighborhoods connected to the narrator's biography. The solenoid buried in the foundations of his own house is described as a "gift" given to him, and his life's search is to discover the purpose of the other solenoids spread in the other energetic points of the city. The invisible solenoid is the mechanism (the "madeleine"--Cartarescu's word) that allows the narrator to transform Bucharest's visible ugliness into a Magic City. A Romanian reader could recognize in this vision an ars poetica that comes from the interwar poet Tudor Arghezi, a poet who wanted to take "boils and mud" and turn them into beauty. This is obvious particularly in the scene of the "blue amphora," a beautiful bottle the narrator discovers among the shards of recycled glass left on the school's halls, and whose beauty triggers another levitation in his bedroom. We find out that the previous owner of the beautiful bottle, a high school student, also lives above a solenoid. A fourth solenoid is located under her school, the same school where the narrator teaches; and the fifth is under the house of a librarian who owns a copy of the famous Voynich manuscript, which he will gift to the narrator (the author of this fifteenth century manuscript, named after a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer, is not directly related to Ethel Voynich--but this coincidence is part of the search for a coherence that underlines the entire project of Solenoid. Coincidentally, these types of synchronicities are also very common in Sebald, who happens to be the writer that Susan Sontag identifies as representing literary greatness.)

The sixth solenoid is buried under a brightly lit warehouse (solenoid comes from "sole," sun), which the narrator used to see in the distance, as a child, while playing inside the cabin of an abandoned truck without wheels when visiting his aunt in yet another impoverished area of Bucharest, Dudecti Cioplea. I have no doubt that in that truck, which is located across from the central solenoid around which all the others are positioned on an imaginary ring, the child that Cartarescu once was, used to daydream and imagine fantastic, beautiful worlds. Inside this ugly truck, a great writer was bom through an alchemic process that turns low into high, ugliness into beauty and darkness into light (speaking of alchemy, gold is a recurrent word in countless expressions used in the novel). Ini'espacedes reves, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard advances the theory that the first space where we daydream as children is the matrix that forms our future creative selves. I suspect that this truck is the space where the author of Solenoid was bom. By writing over eight hundred pages to disclose that the central solenoid of his quest is located in the crux where his self was formed, Cartarescu has written a novel whose quest is its own origin. A Proustian novel.

And yet, as the story of a failed novelist who has no other ambition than to be an anonymous, average teacher of Romanian whose life story won't be written by anyone, to be "the writer/reader/liver of my own life," Solenoid is deliberately anti-Proustian. The narrator, an "antiwriter," writes every night "an anti-book." Once, in his youth, during a literary salon, his work was rejected by his audience and critics, and, as a consequence, instead of going on to become a successful writer (whom Cartarescu calls "the Other"), he has become an anonymous individual, someone who chose life over literature. Several times in the novel, the narrator tells us that if he had to choose between saving a masterpiece or a child from fire, he would save the child, even if he knew that the child would turn out to be Hitler or the Antichrist. Of course, the very fact that Cartarescu has this dilemma is a sign that literature is still impregnated for him with a mythical value that it doesn't have for most Western writers, of whom very few (maybe a George Steiner) would be concerned with this kind of moral dilemma. Briefly, in choosing to be an anti-writer, Cartarescu writes a counternarrative in which he imagines that instead of becoming the successful writer he is today he would be just the opposite. But in choosing anti-literature he still chooses myth over life. When the narrator, given the choice between his child and his manuscript, chooses to sacrifice the latter by throwing it into the fire, he, indirectly and paradoxically, ends up embracing another literary myth: the myth of Kafka's sacrifice--Kafka, Cartarescu's literary idol, whose last wish was the immolation of his manuscripts after his death. While Kafka's decision may have been grounded in a religious ethos (the desire to be faithful to ajewish vision of non-representation), or simply, the desire to be faithful to the Absolute, Cartarescu's choice of life over literature is also, indirectly, a rejection of one of Romania's foundational myths of creation, the Ballad of Manole, in which the craftsman Manole sacrifices the person he loves most in the world, his pregnant wife (and therefore, his future child), by immuring her in the walls of the monastery he builds, and thus, giving eternal life to his creation. Whereas Cartarescu's reason to burn the narrator's manuscript is, in a way, opposite to Kafka's, insofar as it is a rejection of any type of Absolute, the act itself, the sacrifice of the manuscript through fire, replicates the act of his literary model. As the manuscript is burning, the main character of Solenoid, the city of Bucharest, is subject to a Hollywoodian apocalypse: all the buildings are collapsing, and the narrator, his beloved and child are running for their lives, and then, the city begins to levitate, like a Marquezian character, toward the skies. The ending is highly ambiguous: Cartarescurejects the Literary Absolute, but his main character is elevated from a decaying structure to a celestial dimension. The same thing happens with the burnt manuscript, which flies toward the heavens. Under the sign of Mors (death in Latin), ugly reality morphs into divine fiction.

While In Search of Lost Time is the story of the discovery of a literary vocation and of writing down the story of this discovery, Solenoid is the antithesis of Proust's search in its programmatic desire to destroy the myth of literature, which, judging from Cartarescu's interviews, was the absolute myth of his youth. In this sense, Solenoid is, more than anything else, a project to understand one's own life, a search for meaning. His life's desire, says his narrator, has always been to find a coherence of all the signs that scream to be deciphered, and to interpret the puzzle thus found, and his biggest failure would be not to be able to uncover an answer. Of course, the reader can say that the very existence of this book contradicts the narrator's/ author's claim about his lack of interest in a literary project, but this is the paradox and advantage of literary space, which is also that of a dream: to allow the writer/ dreamer to speak about it while being inside it, to be both inside and outside of a given space. His repeated remark that he hates fiction and novels can be read, then, in this context: what he hates is gratuitous invention and the articulation of a plot, and he refuses to invent in the same way Celan once said "I never invented anything."

Some of the less fictionalized scenes in the novel are the descriptions of daily life in Communist Romania (which are also the most absurd, and which, for this reason, may be wrongly seen as "surrealist" by some American readers). While the novel's overall, very ambitious artistic vision may not be evident to most readers, there is general agreement, even among its critics, that its most realized aspect consists in its.realist depictions of life in pre-nineties Romania. Solenoid contains some of the greatest scenes I've ever encountered with the grotesque humanoids Communism has created--see, for instance, the scene with the students who participate in a contest called "the best atheist," in which they are competing by spitting on an icon of the Virgin Mary--, but because the author has no horse to beat, its political aspect is not immediately evident, especially not for a Western reader. In this sense, Solenoid is a great lesson in how to write a novel with political implications: Cartarescu, an apolitical writer, proves that a novel written without any agenda can be truly political if the writer has the power to reflect the truthfulness of an era.

There were moments when I felt that Cartarescu's programmatic rejection of literature in the name of life (his choice of the child over the masterpiece) was a little self-indulgent, insofar as, logically, this book wouldn't exist if he truly rejected literature, but the more I approached the ending, the more I thought that Solenoid is, in fact, a painfully honest, raw testimony (for instance, there are several pages filled with the word "Help!"). Cartarescu's project is mystic rather than literary, and his literary persona here has a Dostoyevskian touch. He doesn't want to create "the greatest novel" ever written, which is the ultimate ideal of most writers. What he wants is to go to the very sources of knowledge and to the matrix through which we, humans, understand the world. Toward the end of the novel, he imagines that he is a different type of creature, and he gives us an amazing metaphor of Christianity by putting himself in the body and mind of a dust mite. The dust mite creates a God in its own image, and then a child of God to redeem its sins.

One can understand a lot about a writer if one looks at the first and last words of his book. Solenoid starts with "I" (which in Romanian is implicit) and ends with "stars"--the stars about which the narrator tells us several times that they cause him a strange terror, a sort of horror sacrum. This adventure in knowledge takes place between the I and the higher, terrifying realm of the stars, that is, it moves from low to high (or from the realm of the subjective to that of the divine and the impersonal). Westerners have forgotten that the sacred was the realm in which our distinctions between low and high don't apply (see the meaning of the Latin word "sacrum")--an ambiguity that is still valid in a non-Westem country such as Romania.

Is literary greatness still possible? Maybe so, but only if one believes in certain categories that have become obsolete in contemporary "posthuman" Western societies. Maybe in order to write the "greatest" novel one needs to place oneself in the world in such a way as to see oneself the way Cartarescu sees pregnant women, each inside another one, like Russian dolls, each one a link in a preexisting chain, a chain that offers a much larger perspective than the one of the binary division between "form" and "content." A woman inside another woman inside another woman negates this division, as well as the distinction between inside and outside, because she is both container and content. Ultimately, Cartarescu attempts to rethink the categories through which we look at the world and at ourselves, and, in rethinking them, he becomes himself a link in the long chain of the world's great writers. In attempting to place him somewhere within the map of literary greatness, his Romanian publisher has compared him to Albert Camus--a comparison bom, I believe, of the wish of Solenoids narrator to find "an exit" for his existential dilemma. But while this existentialist framework is one of the possible readings of the novel, it narrows its much greater vision and ambition.

If you begin reading Solenoid you may not be able to finish it--it took me several months--but this is one of those rare books you should have in your library because its shelf life will endure as long as literature lasts. Although I read Solenoid in its original Romanian, and only part of it in English, based on the excerpts I read and on everything I know about the translator, Sean Cotter, I believe that this translation is an impressive achievement.

Alta Ifland is a Romanian-born American writer whose latest novels are Speaking to No. 4 (Nov. 2022) and The Wife Who Wasn't (2021). A former French lecturer, she now lives in France.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
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Ifland, Alta. "Mircea Cartarescu's Solenoid." The Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2022, pp. 110+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A727475283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=174e9602. Accessed 27 June 2024.

QUOTED: "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."
"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."

''Solenoid,'' by the Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu, is an endlessly strange study of existence and the longing to escape it.

SOLENOID, by Mircea Cartarescu | Translated by Sean Cotter

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.''

Dustin Illingworth has written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Times Literary Supplement.

SOLENOID | By Mircea Cartarescu | Translated by Sean Cotter | 639 pp. | Deep Vellum | Paperback, $24.95

Dustin Illingworth has written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Times Literary Supplement.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: ''Solenoid'' braids realism and hallucination. (PHOTOGRAPH BY AGNIESZKA DOMANSKA/EYEEM, VIA GETTY IMAGES) This article appeared in print on page BR20.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The New York Times Company
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Illingworth, Dustin. "As All Get Out." The New York Times Book Review, 18 Dec. 2022, p. 20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A730437541/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=003c35fe. Accessed 27 June 2024.

Blinding: The Left Wing

Mircea Cartarescu, trans, from the Romanian by Sean Cotter. Archipelago (Consortium, dist.), $22 (464p) ISBN 978-1-935-74485-6

A good sense of time and place is the highlight of this overstuffed novel set in 20th century Romania--volume one of a trilogy that continues with Blinding: The Body and Blinding: The Right Wing. Mircea, a sensitive teenager, spends a great deal of time looking out the window of his bedroom in Bucharest. His father is often away and he feels little attachment to his mother, Maria. The novel's second part depicts Maria as a 15-year-old in 1955 as she leads an impoverished but colorful life. She works as an apprentice tailor, sharing a bed with her 17-year-old sister, Vasilica. The two young women attend inexpensive neighborhood movie theaters as a respite from the long hours they spend sewing. In part three, Mircea is sent to a hospital, where his treatment includes sessions with a blind masseur, and he is brought face-to-face With his fellow patients' suffering. Some of Cartarescu's descriptions are evocative, as when he writes of military officers who are "the quintessence of both Hercule Poirot and the mythological Hercules." But the author is rarely satisfied with one word when he can use a hundred, and his story struggles mightily not to drown in a sea of excess verbiage. (Oct.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
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"Blinding: The Left Wing." Publishers Weekly, vol. 260, no. 30, 29 July 2013, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A338325421/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1f59bbb1. Accessed 27 June 2024.

"[euro]100,000 Dublin literary award won by Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu; Cartarescu's novel Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, was described by judges as 'wildly inventive with passages of great beauty'." Guardian [London, England], 24 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795218366/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4cf08e99. Accessed 27 June 2024. "Dublin City Council announces Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu translated by Sean Cotter as winner of the 2024 Dublin Literary Award." European Union News, 29 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795739939/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df271e13. Accessed 27 June 2024. "Cartarescu, Mircea: SOLENOID." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A721918142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8abf4933. Accessed 27 June 2024. Ifland, Alta. "Mircea Cartarescu's Solenoid." The Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2022, pp. 110+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A727475283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=174e9602. Accessed 27 June 2024. Illingworth, Dustin. "As All Get Out." The New York Times Book Review, 18 Dec. 2022, p. 20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A730437541/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=003c35fe. Accessed 27 June 2024. "Blinding: The Left Wing." Publishers Weekly, vol. 260, no. 30, 29 July 2013, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A338325421/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1f59bbb1. Accessed 27 June 2024.

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