Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025

WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION

‘An instant classic’ New York Times

Based on Cartarescu’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.

PRAISE FOR SOLENOID

‘Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult’ TLS’A bravura performance’ The Nation

‘Surreal and viscerally political’ FT

‘Nothing short of remarkable’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘A masterpiece’ Astra Magazine

Publisher Review

'This profoundly surreal book presents an inner life like no other. Solenoid is the bewildering, unclassifiable, barely comprehensible record of a dreamer and a visionary, genius and nutcase, loner and loser, philosopher and pariah - all rolled into one. . . Mircea Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult' - TLS 'An engrossing study of a cerebral antihero, who longs to escape his earthly existence. . . an instant classic' - New York Times 'A bravura performance: extravagantly brilliant ideas pinwheeling out from the dark center of a scrupulously imagined and death-driven self' - The Nation 'A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written' - Kirkus (starred review) 'The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cartarescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical' - Wall Street Journal