Solenoid is an excellent and surprisingly accessible novel. It is an achievement, one I admire for its artistic prowess. Part of me believes that true art can only be captured: we cannot make it whole-cloth, and instead we might, through communion with a higher essence, steal a fragment of it for our own work. Solenoid feels very much like a product of an otherworldly communion, with its feverish and nightmarish spectacles, pulled from the edges of our imagination.
The weaknesses in the novel lie in its plot and other more mundane aspects of its incarnation as a book. We read the diary of a Romanian middle-school teacher, tormented by “anomalies”—strange dreams, bizarre occurrences—and a foreboding sense that these oddities are a key to the puzzle of his life. There really isn’t much progression, per se, in the book. The situation of our main character stagnates up until the very end. Much of the novel is also devoted to recollection. Really, this is a novel you read not for plot, but for imagery, philosophy, and art.
It proceeds as a series of fascinating and awesome scenes, which do interlock logically, and progress to a coherent, albeit mysterious, whole. A lot of them unfold somewhat formulaically: we learn a bit more about the main character’s life, while some bizarre occurrence afflicts him, triggering philosophical digressions. These scenes are beautifully described, and captivating both in their imagery and their reflection on the human condition.
That said, you do get the impression that the book could be shorter. It meanders, repeats itself, and leaves many threads loose. However, attempting such a hack-job is like cutting a painting to fit a smaller frame: you realize that any piece, in isolation, is beautiful and essential, and can’t quite figure where to apply the knife. There may be redundancies, but it’s hard to find which can be removed without disturbing the whole. The hypnotic writing process that resulted in this lengthy tome has also resulted in its captivating and otherworldly imagery. Perhaps this is the price to pay.
The novel is almost solipsistic, describing things from a deep first person, where you feel in tune with, almost suffocated by, the thoughts of the protagonist. Their outlook is also very self-centered. Having been raised, in essence, by literature, they have a reflex to view the world inwardly. The world almost ceases to exist when their eyes close, and they experience it as a mere shadow of the richness of their own mind.
The central fascination of our main character stems from their mental experience. The anomalies they experience are perceived less as phenomena of the world, and more so appearances within the mind itself. The division between dream, reality, apparition, hallucination is blurred, as they occupy the same mental space. The bizarre occurrences in our protagonist’s life are rarely questioned for their reality; their meaning is what’s of essence.
A central theme is that of meaning. Many times, the main character’s life is described as a puzzle, with the strange happenings being clues to its meaning. “Why do I exist”? “What is the meaning of my life”? Perhaps the oddities are nightmares he experiences can answer such questions.
A more pointed version of these inquiries might be: “Why do we suffer”? In an interview, Mircea Cărtărescu described the novel as being about “where does Evil come from?”. The search for meaning in the book is often oriented around a search for understanding suffering, a teleology of pain. The anomalies that confront our protagonist are not benign, but come in the form of pain, grief, fear, suffering: they are the manifestations of Evil. Through his diary, he wants to understand these sufferings as being the key to the great puzzle of life. He doesn’t want them to be aimless, random, but rather subject to some higher purpose. His desire is natural, and as the novel progresses, there seems to be a connection between the phenomena.
Patterns link the anomalies together, but the revelation of a deeper connection only creates more questions, and a greater mystery. It’s as if you solve one mystery, only to reveal the more complex workings of a mechanism beyond your understanding. The presence of such machinery provides no unraveling of the ultimate mystery, with its inner workings still beyond your reach.
Another persistent theme is that of the insect. Humans are compared to insects. This serves to reflect on the state of humanity in comparison to these mysteries, and to the Divine. In the same way that the lives of mites take place at a scale below our own recognition, so too might the suffering of humans take place below the recognition of God. Perhaps we suffer—the answer the books’s central question—because we are like puny insects to God, unworthy of his attention.
The insect also serves as a reminder of how arbitrary the structure of living beings is, and how the human form is merely a particular shape that life can take. Insects are strange, ugly, and in many cases, horrifying and grotesque. That humans share their lineage with animals is disconcerting to some, but the even then we picture this commonality with imagery of cute mammals in mind, and not the deformed multi-legged abomination of a mite.
The insect is an invitation towards the strange and mysterious. Various cults are presented as having their recruitment involve the presentation of insects in the palm of their hands; stag-beetles, crickets, mantises are revealed to invite the initiate into the strange world of the cult.
Of particular interest is the cult of the “picketists”, a group protesting death and suffering itself. They go to morgues, hospitals, and so on, with signs bearing messages such as “down with Death”, “End to Cancer”, “No more Pain”, and so on. Their protest, on its face, is futile. The problem of suffering can surely not be alleviated through protest, as if its commander were merely ignorant of human opposition. However, despite this absurdity, the pickestists are portrayed positively, as one of the few examples of humans coming together in fraternity and solidarity. The protagonist is also able to elevate himself beyond his isolation, and serve as an inspiring voice, through them.
The city of Bucharest serves a prominent role in the novel, although filtered through the cerebral view of the main character. He has a particular mental map of the city, with enlarged nodes for his childhood stages, and shriveled corners in places he rarely visits. The city is portrayed throughout the novel as sad, as tormenting humans, as a ruined arena designed, if for any purpose at all, to torment its denizens. The novel ends in the city being revealed to feed on the lamentation and suffering of its inhabitants, collecting this energy for some unknown nefarious purpose.
The ending offers an existentialist answer to the problem of suffering. Facing the embodiment of damnation—as a massive, foreboding, and deadly statue come to life—our protagonist must choose between the sacrifice of his infant daughter, and that of his manuscript, the tome documenting his anomalies, and serving as his means to try and figure out the riddle of his life.
He chooses his daughter, symbolically rejecting his attempt to solve the puzzle, in favor of embracing the absurdity of life itself. This offers an answer to suffering: the we endure it, and that we find meaning and happiness in the struggle of living.