Solenoid

A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from CÄfrtÄfrescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on CÄfrtÄfrescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history-- the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript--Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

Literature & Fiction

Cărtărescu, Mircea

Literary

Deep Vellum Publishing

Before becoming the most important Romanian novelist of his generation, Mircea C?rt?rescu wrote poetry influenced by the "hallucinatory imagery" of Allen Ginsberg and distinguished by its Beat sensibility and humor. C?rt?rescu was in his twenties in the 80s, and his word-slinging poems, with references to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, remain subversive gestures under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceau?escu: "The West opened my eyes." A young man "overwhelmed by loneliness," charged with erotic, urban energy, and besotted with Natalie Wood, he observed the anonymous women on bicycles and at tram stops with "my hundred thousand eyes, crematoria windows of sparks, [which] set the fir trees ablaze and leave the mountain bald." Brimming with adolescent yearning, self-consciously "complicated," and unwilling to silence themselves, C?rt?rescu's poems convey the nervous vibrancy of the younger generation living immediately before and after the fall of communism.

A Spider's History of Love

Poetry

New Meridian Arts

Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist’s childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, Secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, and the installation of the communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from this strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed.

Blinding

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Archipelago

Orbitor

Genre Fiction

Фоліо

Pourquoi nous aimons les femmes

DENOEL

Théodoros

NOIR BLANC

Die Wissenden: Roman

dtv Verlagsgesellschaft

Nostalgia

Contemporary

Suhrkamp Verlag AG

Travestie

Zsolnay-Verlag

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Books by Cărtărescu, Mircea