The experiential quality of wandering within Cărtărescu’s maze is not only at the heart of Solenoid’s formal gambit, but it is also an integral part of the subject the novel is most interested in investigating - the self. It’s one thing to gesture at the notion of the labyrinthian in a five-page story, and another thing entirely to place readers inside an immense construct of shifting, unstable walls, to actively strip them of their sense of directional (and temporal) linearity. What, then, does Cărtărescu stand to gain with Solenoid’s flagrant violation of narrative compression, the hallmark of his most prominent surrealist influences? Instead of delivering a sharp, succinct punch, Solenoid goes the way of the oceanic - rejecting brevity because the author, a Romanian Daedalus, is laying the foundation for a narrative labyrinth. As anyone left stunned after an encounter with Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” or Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” will testify, well-executed high-concept short fiction can be a powerful force.

For how can one deny the case for narrative concision made by Kafka’s best stories or Borges’s corpus? The stories of the classic 20th-century dream weavers knock readers out of balance with everyday reality, only to hustle them, still dazed, out of the textual and back into the real world. Borges’s maxim expresses a kind of anxiety every reader must contend with before committing to such a mammoth text: is reading this going to be worth the effort? And, especially in the domain of surrealist literature, the question seems especially apropos. Romanian surrealist Mircea Cărtărescu is an avowed devotee of Borges, though his novel Solenoid - released in English in October by Deep Vellum Press (translated by Sean Cotter) - is a vast book, not just 500 pages, but significantly more. IN THE INTRODUCTION to the 1941 publication of his The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges famously contends that “it is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.”

Solenoid roman mircea cărtărescu