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.