Name: Solenoid
SKU: 54264566
Price: 25.14 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Cartarescu, Mircea ; Cotter, Sean
ISBN: 9781646052028

Type

Physical Book

Author

Mircea Cartarescu

Translated by

Sean Cotter

Publisher

Deep Vellum Publishing

Year

2022

Language

English

Pages

672

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.6x14.7x4.8 cm

Weight

0.80 kg.

ISBN13

9781646052028

Synopsis "Solenoid "

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, Words Without BordersA highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Cărtărescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths.Based on Cărtărescu'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.

Mircea Cartarescu

(Author)

View Author's Page

Mircea Cartarescu was born on June 1, 1956 in Bucharest, Romania into a middle-class family. From an early age, he showed a strong interest in literature and music, influenced by the counterculture of the 60s and 70s. He pursued his studies at the University of Bucharest, in the faculty of letters where he earned a PhD with a fascinating thesis on Romanian postmodernism. He has been a university professor, editor, and contributor to literary magazines, as well as an active member of the Romanian PEN Club and the European Cultural Parliament.

He began his literary career as a poet in 1978 and published his first book, Faurir, vitrin, fotografii (1980), which earned him the Romanian Writers' Union Award. His work is characterized by lyrical, dreamlike, and experimental prose, in which the boundary between reality and dream blurs. He has explored themes such as memory, identity, recent Romanian history, and the transformative power of literature.

He was awarded the prestigious Formentor Prize for Literature, and has received awards of the importance of the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages. His texts have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

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