yana's Updates

"Winner of the International Dublin Literary Award 2024
Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize

I don't believe in books - I believe in pages, in phrases, in lines.

Solenoid is Sean Cotter’s magnificent translation of Mircea Cărtărescu 2015 novel of the same name, an impressive novel as attested to by its prize success.

The novel has many strands but the highlights for me were:

- the aphorisms and parables, inspired by Kafka (see below) and Borges;
- the portrayal of (Communist era) Bucharest which for the narrator is both the centre of the universe (he argues that the existence of other cities may simply be fables as far as his own experience goes) and the one city he claims was designed and built already in a state of decay;
- the remarkable story of the family of George Boole, the creator of Boolean algebra), which includes Mary Everest Boole, niece of George Everest, after whom the mountain is named); his daughter Ethan Lilian Voynich (author of the book, which, unknown to her, was read in millions of copies in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and married to the antiquarian book dealer from which the Voynich Manuscript takes its name); Boole’s son-in-law, married to another daughter, Charles Howard Linton, inventor of the tesseract and whose son was to invent the Jungle Gym, and granddaughter one of the few women at the Manhattan Project.

I can give a deposition on my first memories, about the brother missing from them, about the moment in which my mother left me in the unlocatable hospital where I woke on an operating table, under the stars. I can talk about my incomprehensible feeling of predestination. About doctors and dentists who tortured me throughout my childhood. About the book I literally bathed in tears when I was twelve, even though I understood absolutely nothing from it: The Gadfly by Ethel Lilian Voynich. About the way I rediscovered the novel with Carbonari and Freudian conflicts much later, in the Department of Letters library. About how amazed I was when Goia told me the story of the Boole family and the mathematician's five prodigious daughters, about the chaos that the amoral, young genius, a friend of Lewis Carroll, produced in this family, unraveling its logico-mathematic geometry, exploding its Victorian principles, and infusing their thoughts with the telescopic insanity of the fourth dimension: worlds within worlds, in the depths and heights arranged in an asymptotic spiral of grandeur that the poor ganglion imprisoned in our skulls cannot comprehend. How can you not think that the series Gadfly-Boole-Hinton is a sign, a model trajectory, a map for your great escape plan? And how can you ascribe to chance the fact that Ethel eventually married the one found, after a rocambolesque, six-century adventure, by the manuscript that today bears his name: the incomprehensible, monstrous Voynich manuscript? And why are the manuscript's fat women—naked, with their pink nipples and curly hair, bathing in communicating bathtubs in a bizarre system of pipes—identical to those in Bucharest's underground passages, on the trajectory of the Floreasca militia station-the block on Stefan cel Mare- the Masina de Paine Clinic? And why, again, are Nicolae Minovici’s visions, from his controlled auto-hangings, performed over the course of decades in one of the wings of the morgue (scientific ardor? morose hedonism?) so similar to the cabalistic circles painted on the pages of the Voynich manuscript?

That said it is a flawed masterpiece.

Most notably it is simply too long - there are parts that would have been better cut, most notably the passages of recorded dreams from the narrator’s earlier notebooks, which added little to the text, particularly given the “real��-world of the novel already crosses, very effectively, into a Dantean dreamscape. And, the fact that, while filling 7 pages with “Help!�� printed 3105 times (yes I counted) isn’t quite at Ducks Newburyport levels of tedious padding, it still is a waste of ink and paper.

On which topic, it seems Snoopy had the idea first:

description

The length is particularly striking given that the narrator of the novel sets out his manifesto for writing, using Kafka’s notebooks as an example of how it should be done:

”The master of dreams, the great Issachar, sat in front of the mirror, his spine against its surface, his head hanging far back, sunk deep into the mirror. Then Hermana appeared, master of the twilight, and she melted into Issachar's chest, until she completely disappeared." I have often wondered about the source of my aversion to the novel, why I would have looked down on myself if I had written novels, "books about," endless stories, why it is I hate Scheherazade and all her children who labor to produce narrations so we can learn morals or wile our lazy hours. Why I never wanted to write from pleasure or for pleasure. Why I don't want to draw monumental gates, or even little cat doors, on the walls of literature. Why I define myself by my illnesses and insanities, not through my books. Why I am so resentful that I was kicked out of literature. This fragment from Kafka answers all. You will not find sentences like this one in any book, because not even Kafka dared to transform them into the tiny ear bones of any narrative. They were left in the obscure pages of his journal, destined for the flames, pages that did not delectate and did not instruct, pages that did not exist but were more meaningful than all those that have ever existed. You don't need a thousand pages for a psychodrama, just five lines about Issachar and Hermana.

And women in the novel seem to exist primarily as sexual objects and there are other problematic aspects from a diversity perspective (the end of the first passage quoted above is typical). It reads like a novel translated from the 1970s or perhaps 1980s, but I was surprised to see the original was actually published in 2015, although I think the novel itself is set in that earlier era (the narrator, like the author, was born in the mid 1950s).

While a satisfyingly challenging read, this is a more accessible introduction to the author’s work than the hallucinatory Orbitor trilogy, of which only the first part, Blinding, has been translated into English, also by Cotter. However my favourite of his translated works to date remains Nostalgia and he is an author that I think works better as novella than at tome length.

Highly worthwhile and a strong International Booker contender I suspect. [as it indeed proved!]

The judges' take

Solenoid is uncategorisable epic of interconnected realities, a book that seems to be about�� everything. On a single page you might be flung from intimate insights into the banality of a teacher’s life to grand theoretical re-imaginings of the universe, to microscopic insights into mites, matter, love or letter-forms. It’s a mind-boggling, bravura and ceaselessly entertaining book, unlike anything else. The translation struck us as word perfect, a feat of attention to detail that transports us with total control from Communist Romania to the far sci-fi reaches of the imagination and back again."