Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu

The essential ambiguity of my writing. Its irreducible insanity. I was in a world that cannot be described, and definitely not understood, through any other kind of writing, insofar as it can truly be comprehended. Revealing is one thing, and the painful process of reverse engineering, which is true understanding, quite another. You have before your eyes an artifact of another world, with other dawns and other gods, an enigmatic Antikythera mechanism that shines, floating in the air, in all the details of its metal brackets covered with symbols and small gears. It was difficult to retrieve it from the bottom of the sea, from all its oyster beds and undulating algae, to meticulously clean off the crust of petrified and and rust, to grease it with glittering oil, to set every gear in place so all the teeth fit together, and this is what my manuscript has done, up to this point: it has revealed, brought to light, unveiled what was hidden behind veils, it has decrypted what was locked in the crypt, it has deciphered the cipher of the box where it lay, without even a dash of the unknown object's shadow and melancholy dripping into our world.

Solenoid is narrated by an alternative version of Mircea Cartarescu, the writer whose 600-page phantasmagoria has made him famous (in book terms) around the world as well as in his native Romania. This version of Cartarescu, instead of achieving acclaim for his poetry early in life, had his work mocked and rejected, and ended up as a teacher of Romanian literature in a Bucharest middle school. He goes home each night to his "boat-shaped house," where a strange mechanical device--the title solenoid--generates a field that allows him to float above his bed at night. The solenoid provides the key, perhaps, to the strange and otherworldly occurrences that punctuate his life: the dream-like "visitors" that appear at his bedside, the invisible aliens who capture the school janitor, the enormous automaton that stomps a man to death, the secret chambers beneath the factory beside the school, the window into another world peopled by mites and other animalcules blown up to size of elephants.

If you know one thing about Solenoid, it's that it includes seven pages of nothing but the word "help!" repeated over and over. It's a cry that comes from deep within the narrator's being: help me! Get me out of this life, where I am imprisoned in a body, a body that will ultimately die. One of the funnier bits of Solenoid involves a group of protesters called the "Picketists" who demonstrate against death. Their protests are useless, of course, but who doesn't spend much of their life wondering about their own end, and why it has to be so, why it can't be otherwise? "Otherwise" is a key word for Solenoid, a word that resounds in its many doppelgangers and doubles, of which the second Cartarescu is one. (Another can be found in the way the narrator tells us he was raised as a girl by his parents, in effect, as his own dead or vanished twin sister.) Why must things be one way rather than another? Why must we be trapped in this existence, both metaphysically and physically?

I don't think I can explain to you what exactly the solenoids of the novel are, or what they're supposed to do, or how exactly they fit into the larger novel. I do get the sense that their power is in enabling that otherwise, in giving the narrator and others the ability to see life from another vantage point than their own limited one. Solenoid insists that, even though our own perspectives are by nature limited by our physical being, there is a world greater and more expansive that interacts with our own. The narrator's obsession with tesseracts is one example of this: four-dimensional shapes that change and transform as they pass through our own three-dimensional world, just as a three-dimensional cube passed through a plane creates a diamond that opens like a flower.

Another are the many, many images of microscopic animals, first arrayed in a kind of museum (accessible, House of Leaves-like, through a mysterious door in the narrator's own home), then glimpsed through a magical window. Cartarescu describes the mites as looking like the long-legged elephants from Dali; only later did I come to understand that what the narrator is given a glimpse of is not an alien planet, but our own world at a different scale, a world that is part of our own but has as little relation to our world as ours does to the world of the fourth-dimension--or the world of God. In one climactic scene--maybe the highlight of the long, bizarre novel--the narrator is transformed by a sympathetic librarian into a mite, where he is tasked with becoming the "Christ of the mites." How does a mite talk about? Through stomach waves and magnetic fields, it seems. The narrator's gospel "inspired in them an attitude they hadn't felt before, a longing toward what is impossible to imagine," and his description of the divine "they could not imagine except as an endlessly lazy and incredibly sad mite, wrapped in baroque-fetid scents, in whom putridness and sandalwood, formaldehyde and oleander, cinnamon and hydrogen sulfide, as well for us inconceivable smells of eyes, sky, spider, scream, hunger, claw, bronze, god, near, and, nor, probably weave together into a metaphysical robe of endless grandeur." This is, I think, wildly funny and poignant: all your religion, Cartarescu seems to say, is a cribbed and malformed understanding of that divine otherwise, and yet, by pointing the way outside of the self, it points to truth.

Once in my life I believed that the best novels are more metaphysical than political; they explore certain truths about human life that are beyond history and culture. I don't really believe that anymore; at least, I don't believe that the political is a sphere separate from the metaphysical, and I feel that claims to expressions about "the human condition" often ignore the ways that humans actually interact with one another. But Solenoid inspires the old feeling in me, that there is a truth at the bottom of human life, and it deals with the mystery of existence and the inescapable tragedy of death. Help! You said it, brother.

The Appointment by Herta Muller

Now all I hear is the noise; I don't go to the window, and I don't look at the moon.  I remember that it looks like a goose egg, and that it leaves the city on one side of the sky while the sun comes up at the other.  Nothing's changed there; that's how it was even before I knew Paul, when I used to walk to the tram stop on foot.  On the way I thought:  How bizarre that something so beautiful could be up in the sky, with no law down here forbidding people to look at it.

What does it mean to love in authoritarian state?  When life is proscribed by a law that is exacting and absolute yet somehow arbitrary in its application, what areas of life does it not proscribe or threaten?

The Appointment is a novel about a woman living in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, supposedly the most repressive of dictators in the fringe of Soviet states.  Ceausescu himself is not mentioned except on the dust jacket; the narrator (who is nameless) battles with smaller authorities.  She is summoned, frequently and randomly, to appear in the office of Albu, a local magistrate.  The appointments are always at ten sharp, that sharp emphasizing the bureaucracy's menace as well as its exactitude.  The crime which Albu grills her about: sewing notes into clothes bound for Italy that read "marry me."  In his interrogations, which Muller only allows us to glimpse, he suggests that he suspects her of more vital communication with the West, but more than anything it seems that the narrator's crime is simply wanting to escape.  For this crime the authorities impress her neighbors into watching her movements; for this crime her husband is nearly run over on his motorcycle.

Albu can gain nothing from these interrogations; the narrator cannot escape them.  Yet the strength of the repression is predicated on this aimless urgency.  But the narrative of The Appointment revolves around one tram ride to Albu's office broken by the narrator's reminiscences, which recount her attempts to carve out a personal and human space:

Instead of these thoughts we're constantly mulling over, it would be better to have the actual things inside your head, so you could reach in and touch them.  People you want, or people you want to be rid of.  Objects you've held on to or lost.  There would be an order to things in my head: in the center would be Paul, but not clutching at him and running away from him and loving him all at the same time.  The sidewalks would run along my temples, as far as they like, and under my cheeks might be the shops with their glass display cases, though not my pointless destinations in the city.  Of course there's no escaping Albu's lackey, who's probably sitting out there in that red car to give me my summons--not deliver, it's never in writing, so that I'm always left to worry whether Paul or I might have misheard the date.  Albu's lackey would be lurking somewhere in the back of my head...

You can see how the narrator is half-resigned to her place in the world; she doesn't seek to banish Albu's lackey, only shuffle him around in the order of things.

The Appointment leaps dizzyingly from the present tram ride to a number of points in the narrator's past, chopped up and reshuffled so that the timeline is difficult to keep straight.  (Maybe this mental reshuffling, too, is an attempt to impose a personal order on a proscribed one?)  But each memory is wonderfully and uniquely realized, and together they form a rich picture of life: The narrator's marriage to Paul, who sells illegal television aerials that reach Western stations.  Her previous marriage to the son of a Communist operative who once lorded over her hometown and its bitter dissolution.  Her young, beautiful friend Lilli, shot dead trying to cross the border with an older soldier she had fallen in love with.

The Appointment, in fact, is full of relationships, prurient and not, between younger women and older men.  Muller makes the Electral connotations of this explicit by having her narrator remember walking in on her father with a girl her own age:

I'm better than that girl with her braid, I thought, why doesn't Papa take me.  She's dirty, her hands are green from all the vegetables.  What does he want with her, she has a good husband.

Lilli begins with her father-in-law, the first in a long string of older men who eventually lead her to a premature grave; the narrator recounts being hit on by her father-in-law, the Communist operative in addition to wishing to take the place of her father's lover.  Albu, with his unwelcome kiss of the hand at each appointment, is a kind of father, too.  Are we meant to read the state as a kind of father figure, demanding sexual satisfaction, prying abhorrently into places that ought to be closed to it?  And--SPOILER ALERT--what are we to make of the end?  In the present, the narrator misses her stop on the tram and is made late for her appointment.  But before she can make it, she sees her husband Paul with an older man she does not know:

Quite by accident, just out of boredom, the old man glances at the bush and bends down to Paul's ear.  Now Paul stands up and sees me.  Why is he buttoning up his shirt.

What am I supposed to make of this?  Is Muller suggesting a homosexual relationship between Paul and the old man, or is that reading too much into it?  Is her ambiguity incredibly bold or am I incredibly dense?  If that's the implication, is it a chilling notification that authority, personified in the watchful old man, pries even into those places you expect it least?

Other reviews of The Appointment:

The Ardent Reader
Erin Reads
Tim Gebhart at Blogcritics

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

When I read books that are particularly gripping or suspenseful, I have a very bad habit (or my eyes do) of jumping to the last line of a chapter before I can stop myself. It can really deflate the suspense, and I find myself having to cover up the last few lines with my hand or a book mark to keep that from happening. Reading Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, sometimes my greedy eyes still managed to get the best of me. This is a well-written, thrilling novel, and if I’d read The Da Vinci Code, I would probably compare it to that. Alas, I have not, but from what I know both novels’ characters spend most of the story traveling across Europe, unearthing secret documents that have been buried, often intentionally hidden, even, under centuries of history to solve an ancient mystery. The only difference is that instead of trying to bring to light Jesus’ marital status, Kostova’s characters are trying to find, and destroy, the vampire Dracula (I admit that this is a big difference). If nothing else, this book strengthened my sense of European geography, which always used to get a bit fuzzy once I got east of Italy. The main characters spend their time chasing Dracula’s past all across Holland, France, Romania and Hungary, to name just a few.

The book follows three generations of historians, and is narrated by the youngest (she never gives her name), who tells her father’s story through letters he left to her, who in turn relates the story of his mentor through letters written to him within the letters that he wrote to her. All of this results in an infuriating use of quotation marks that led me to seriously question the need to have one-third of the book told through letters. Said letters also really lose their sense of urgency—the man believed himself to be in serious danger of vampire attack—when their author stops warning his daughter and rushing to recount the steps that he took in tracing the path of Vlad Dracula, and starts to spend nearly full pages describing haircuts, exquisite ottomans (the furniture, of course), and Mediterranean food. This didn’t make the book any less entertaining—in fact, quite the opposite. Kostova’s writing is crisp and intelligent, and her descriptions of European architecture and her novel’s characters are captivating. Her sharp (you probably wouldn’t call it beautiful or colorful) prose fleshes out the plot and lends the novel a dark, brooding feel, right from the first paragraph:

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorable forward for us with its shadowy claw.

Scenes switch from innocent to grim with one well-placed word from the author. The first half of the book feels so personal that it reads almost like a diary, and was a believable story for so many pages that it was almost easy to forget that it is, after all, a novel; Kostova keeps up this pretense by taking up the perspective of her own, nameless narrator even in her note to the reader and the dedication: For my father, who first told me some of these stories. Does she want the reader to assume that she is her own narrator? That extra element of reality would contribute significantly to the story’s viability as a thriller. After a while though, it started to seem like little twists were written in just for the sake of making the novel a page-turner, and not necessarily to advance the plot. Again, this didn’t make it any less of a great book. I won’t tell you what happens in the end, but I will leave you with this little bit to pique your interest:

Helen was full of these surprises, and I grew to consider them my daily fare, a pleasant addiction I developed to her ability to catch me off guard. But she never startled me more than at that moment in Istanbul, when she suddenly shot the librarian.