Solenoid

This profoundly surreal book presents an inner life like no other. Solenoid is the bewildering, unclassifiable, barely comprehensible record of a dreamer and a visionary, genius and nutcase, loner and loser, philosopher and pariah - all rolled into one. . . Mircea Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult * TLS *
An engrossing study of a cerebral antihero, who longs to escape his earthly existence. . . an instant classic * New York Times *
A bravura performance: extravagantly brilliant ideas pinwheeling out from the dark center of a scrupulously imagined and death-driven self * The Nation *
A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written * Kirkus (starred review) *
The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cartarescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical * Wall Street Journal *
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. . . The writing itself is hypnotic and gorgeously captures the oneiric quality of Cartarescu's Bucharest. . . The sheer immensity of Cotter's undertaking combined with the unfailing evenness of the translation's quality is nothing short of remarkable * Los Angeles Review of Books *
[An] unsummarisable monster of a book * Irish Times *
A masterpiece. . . Solenoid synthesizes and subtly mocks elements of autofiction and history fiction by way of science fiction. The result is unlike any genre in ambition or effect, something else altogether, a self-sufficient style that proudly rejects its less emancipated alternatives. . . The mesmerizing beauty of creation, of reality giving way to itself: that, above all, lies behind the doors of Solenoid * Astra Magazine *
An anti-novel that for all intents and purposes should not exist but still does despite itself, thanks to the overpowering talents of the author and the translator -- Anton Hur
Presented as the digressive diary of a failed writer teaching at an elementary school in Bucharest, who fantasises about escaping the ugliness of life under communism, this novel by Romania's best-known contemporary author is by turns mundane and metaphysical, surreal and viscerally political * Financial Times *
Extraordinary and baroque... a bravura performance: extravagantly brilliant ideas pinwheeling out from the dark center of a scrupulously imagined and death-driven self. . . deeply absorbing * The Nation *
An engrossing study of a cerebral antihero, who longs to escape his earthly existence * New York Times *