Mircea Cărtărescu, "Solenoid"

Nobody needs literature, says the narrator of this bizarre, fascinating, sometimes wonderful book. Trapped in this earthly hell, leading lonely, miserable lives, what we need instead is an escape plan.

In his youth the narrator wanted to be a writer. He thought literature was itself an escape plan, that by becoming a writer he could break free. But he failed as a writer and ended up as a middle school Romanian teacher in a run-down suburb of Bucharest, dealing with head lice, annoying colleagues, indifferent students, and bizarre diktaks from the Party. It doesn't matter anyway, he says, because literature is not and cannot be a real escape. In the walls of our prison there are dozens of doors with literary names, but they are all painted-on illusions; no matter how much we read or write, we remain prisoners.

This book is, I think, a 672-page meditation on whether that is true: whether literature, or imagination more broadly, can offer us any escape from the misery of human existence. In form it is the memoir of a lonely, unhappy man obsessed with his dreams. But in this narrative the boundaries of the material world are weak, and surreal magic might erupt an any moment. At one point the narrator is sent to investigate the abandoned factory near his school, because the principal thinks students are sneaking off there to smoke and make out. Instead he finds fantastic machinery from an alien or future civilization, waiting in stasis to be activited by some unknown visitor or cataclysm. 

The most striking thing about the book is its boldness. Cărtărescu, it seems, will write about anything. Solenoid begins with a disquisition on head lice and moves on from there to belly button fuzz, the torture of dentistry, recycling drives, oedipal dreams, magnetism, the mathematics of the fourth dimension, faculty infighting, getting lost, a protest movement against death, and whether the seemingly random events of our lives might add up to some kind of pattern. In particular it indulges a kind of self-obsession that borders on solepsism. This world is the narrator's, and it bends around him in like space around a massive black hole, creating bizarre effects. There are plenty of other people, but they exist only so far as they impact the narrator, and it is hinted that when they are out of his sight, some don't exist at all. 

Not all of it works. Some passages bored me, others seemed pointlessly gross. But on the whole it is amazing. If you like weird books and can handle body horror, check it out. I have never read anything more inventive.

Here's another thought. 

In the modern world we have a fascination with what you might call anti-art. In Baltimore there is a whole museum devoted to works by non-artists, where they especially like art by lunatics and prisoners. Many modern painters have tried to deny that they ever went to art school. We like the idea of somehow transmuting raw experience onto the canvas or the page without the vast, mediating mechanism of art, with its crushing weight of tradition and convention. The narrator of Solenoid says over and over that this book is not literature. He failed as a writer, tried to put only one work before the public in his youth and then gave that up. No, this is the raw material of his life, just the way he wrote it in a series of journals. These are his own experiences and his own dreams, written down just as he experienced them. This is what the world needs; reality, not literature.

But the pretense of reality is the actual fantasy. Cărtărescu did spent eight years as a middle school teacher early in his career, and I suspect some of the details are in fact drawn from his own life in Stalinist Romania. But Cărtărescu never gave up on writing. As a teacher he continued to publish poems and essays and he eventually left the school to become editor of a literary journal. According to wikpedia he has published 15 books and won several literary prizes.

Nobody can write a book like Solenoid without years of immersion in literature. Books are not raw experience. They are built of words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, each of them carefully constructed, each image weighed according to which other books it evokes, which experiences, which emotions. To make something feel real requires enormous artifice. Only a consummate professional can create, successfully, the feel of raw imagination poured onto the page by a half-mad amateur. Solenoid does this wonderfully, because it is a work of literary art by a real master, no matter how many times its narrator tries to convince us otherwise.