\u201c<\/i>That<\/i>\u2019<\/i>s why people used books to say important things, because a book assumed an absence, on one side or the other: while it is being written, the reader is missing. While it is being read, the writer is missing.\u201d [pg. 255]<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A solenoid is simply a coil of wire. It has the potentiality <\/i>to create an electromagnetism, but it requires an electrical current to complete its function. Just as a book on a table is an inanimate physical object, sheaths of paper bound and nothing more. It has the potentiality <\/i>to create a connection, to spark an understanding, to share a secret, to communicate, but it requires a reader to complete its function. In the Fall of 2022, I read Solenoid<\/i> by Mircea C\u0103rt\u0103rescu, translated by Sean Cotter, published in English by Deep Vellum, and completed its function.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Solenoid<\/i> is a contemporary Romanian novel, 663 pages in length. It is a surrealist, maximalist interior tale fixated on the body, death, mites, mathematics, literature, organisms and orgasms, consciousness, non-being, the infinite, pain, our skin, memories. Solenoid <\/i>has captured the attention of the literary world, already the subject of a Dustin Illingworth New York Times piece<\/a>, an incredible (can-not-be-missed) two hour video analysis from Seth of WASTE Mailing list<\/a>, and initially put on most of our English-speaking radars by the inimitable, indispensable Patron Saint of World Literature, Andrei of The Untranslated<\/i>, back in 2017, before it had been translated into English, wherein he dubbed it \u201cthe greatest surrealist novel ever written.\u201d<\/a> For scholarship and artistic, leading literary analysis & critique, I can do no more than offer links to their tremendous, important works which will form the foundation of a philology good to eat for a thousand years.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Mircea C\u0103rt\u0103rescu is not without his literary detractors. His prose can be boring, suffused with details to the point of suffocation and distraction at times. He takes the long way often, figuratively and literally, through the streets of an unreal, too real Bucharest, and winds so many disparate threads and obsessions through the magnetic field of his literature to supply dizzying effects that may excite or sicken a reader, depending on their stomach for a ride.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I read nothing else while I read Solenoid<\/i>. Nothing serious. Nothing substantial. I gave it the most precious gift we have. I gave it all of my attention. It is too massive, too sprawling, too serious, and too wonderful for me to completely unravel.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n It took me an incredibly long time to read this book: an entire fall. Longer than my first read of Infinite Jest<\/i>, 2666<\/i>, The Recognitions<\/i>, The Invented Part<\/i> AND The Dreamed Part<\/i> (though not The Tunnel<\/i>, which suffers still from stiff back pages), Shadow Country<\/i>, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming<\/i>. During whole stretches swallowing up several days I may find myself glazing over the letters like hieroglyphic symbols (or the famed Voyanich manuscript, which comes to these pages as two texts, connected and essential, and is ultimately a kind of fulcrum in the novel), unable to settle myself into its pages. I read it restless. I read it tired. I read it sad. I read it during two panic attacks and accompanying dissociative episodes. I read it in the dark, with a flashlight, the night a hurricane knocked out our power. I read it on Grandfather Mountain, in the gift shop, while my wife and kids walked over the swinging bridge I was too afraid to join them on. During the first panic attack, the one in the car alone (like the original one, the very first one, by the field \u2013 it was fallow \u2013 I have written about this elsewhere \u2013 I told the entire story in Characters<\/i>, in parts, out of order, mostly through innuendo and other falsehoods and truthfully, several times, or at least once, as an aside), I read it at the Circle K in Stanford, where I ran into some trouble, waiting for my wife to pick me up. A young man in a tow truck stopped and asked what I was doing. He said did I need some help. He said there could be trouble around here. He said it\u2019s not as nice as it looks around here. I took my copy of Solenoid<\/i> and thanked him, stood up, and waited in my car for my wife to arrive and rescue me from my mind. I read Solenoid<\/i> in an emergency room. I have been to too many emergency rooms. At some point I should have counted. I read Solenoid<\/i> during a rough season of my life and this is my story.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The narrator of Solenoid<\/i>, whose thoughts we never leave, is a writer. A failed one, he admits. As a young man, at a workshop or creative writing class, he read aloud his masterpiece epic poem, “The Fall,” and the response convinced him to give up his dreams of being a writer and settle into a quiet life as a teacher of Romanian literature at a high school in Bucharest, \u201cthe saddest city on the face of the earth, but at the same time, the only true one.\u201d [pg. 425]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I recognized something of my own nothing hometown in Cartarescu\u2019s vision of his Bucharest. The feeling that nothing springs forth from these places. The feeling that these are lost dots on a map, populated by lost people, shuffling along in their lives, from birth to death, anonymous, lonely, unknown and unknowable. Winston-Salem, North Carolina felt, to me, like a ridiculous place to be from. I read of Bucharest and heard the Moravian church bells of Old Salem and the RJR Tobacco smokestacks. I had an immediate urge to travel to Bucharest, this random city. Before I see Paris, I told my wife, before even a speck of Spain, before Prague, before Oslo, before Reykjavik, send my body and soul to Bucharest to see the streets of Solenoid<\/i>, to complete its function, finally making it a real place.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I began reading Solenoid<\/i> in the fall of twenty-twenty, during my own book tour for my first novel. The conceit of this narrator writing these pages in his secret diary with the intention of burning them, all 663, and me having to walk past displays of stacks of his novel to read from my own to three incredibly kind booksellers, two browsers who stumbled in from the rain shaking out their umbrellas in the very back, and one friend I used to do drugs with that lived there in St. Louis and was letting me crash the night was always very depressing and very humbling.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Like the narrator I too am obsessed with literature. I am obsessed with the intimacy and power of literature. I am obsessed with the transference of bits of consciousness from writer to reader. In William Gass\u2019s ghastly literary masterpiece The Tunnel<\/i>, the demented diarist William Frederick Kohler asks \u201cWhat is a book but a container of consciousness, a draft of cantos?\u201d A lonely teacher of high school Romanian literature and failed poet bears little resemblance to Gass\u2019s high priest of literary villainy until you dig deeper and the private details of a consciousness transference, the energy of acute awareness traveling through time and space, become beautifully illuminated.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIs writing to yourself a healthier insanity than talking to yourself\u201d (Gass, William. The Tunnel, pg. 8) Kohler asks. Both narrators write to themselves and for themselves. Kohler is writing an introduction to his historical study Guilt and Innocence in Hitler\u2019s Germany<\/i>, while the teacher of Romanian literature at School 86 in Bucharest is a failed poet writing in a diary only to himself to catalog his \u201canomalies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201c<\/i>I like my desperate gesture of writing here, and the more desperate it is, the more senseless, the more anonymous, the more stuck in the mud of centuries and millennia, of galaxies and metagalaxies it is, the more I like it.\u201d <\/i>[pg. 380]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n When you set out to write about everything, you usually do. That is the beauty and the curse of many big books. Receiving this transference as a reader all comes down to timing in your life and how the prose hits you. He tried to write about everything. Everything wasn\u2019t great. He is being translated so the music of the prose is being played for us. I do not know any Romanian. Not a single word. I don\u2019t know anything about the pacing or the customs of their language system. I am glad there are some people that know these things. I do not. But I do know that it is hard for me to say anything negative about C\u0103rt\u0103rescu’s prose, translated for me by Sean Cotter, when he blesses us with sentences touching the divine: \u201c<\/i>Everything in my bedroom is true: the sheet is a sheet, the plaster is plaster, I am an unimportant mammal who has lived for a moment on Earth.\u201d [pg. 66]<\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n For C\u0103rt\u0103rescu, literature is not merely an aesthetic distraction or entertainment, but something far more capable and powerful:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201c<\/i>A book should demand an answer. If it doesn<\/i>\u2019<\/i>t\u2014if your gaze ends on its ingenious, inventive, tender, wise, joyful, and wonderful surface instead of pointing you in the direction this book shows\u2014then you have read a literary work and you have missed, once again, the meaning of any human effort: to escape from this world. Novels hold you here, they keep you warm and cozy, they put glittering ribbons on the circus horse. But when, for God<\/i>\u2019<\/i>s sake, will you read a real book?\u201d [pg. 210]<\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The narrator\u2019s insecurities stemming from what he perceives as his own failure as a writer spew directly from the firehose of pressure he places on literature as cosmic and spiritual guide, as maker and interpreter of Meaning, as salvation. His very love for the potentiality <\/i>of literature to communicate pure energy and connect the reader and the writer in divine communion paralyzes him when it comes to contributing his own private literature to the eternal public scroll. I know something about this.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Specifically, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu seeks in literature an answer to the dark question we have been cursed with since the first bite of the apple and our sudden, painful knowledge: the question (fear & curiosity & ignorance & flirtation) of non-being. \u201c<\/i>Like horror beyond horror, the greatest horror, the mother of all our fears: the fear of an eternity in which you no longer exist.\u201d<\/i> [pg. 108]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I have struggled with this, as I know many have, my entire life. Recently, I came to something of a an understanding with myself and it goes like this: In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his essay collection The Joyful Pursuit of Knowledge and Understanding, <\/i>declared \u201cGod is dead,\u201d and modernity was birthed from the canal of The Enlightenment. With all this science, and with all this knowledge, how would our moral structures and societal bonds react under the pressure of this existential realization? We could no longer rely on God to organize or explain. Science and Reason were now our masters.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n To this day, 140 years later, many lost souls are still stuck sucking for any air in these dark waters. They miss the findings of another brilliant thinker, who, using the same tools of Science and Reason that had murdered our God, proved His existence and unlocked the mystery by proclaiming the necessity of the mystery to the creation and continued sustenance of our physical world.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1931, Kurt G\u00f6del published his Incompleteness Theorems, discovering the limitations of science and mathematics to explain our world, and, specifically, to explain themselves. He found there was always going to be a paradox present, a mystery, and that the tools we use to explain the functioning of the world were unable to explain themselves. We could no longer count on mathematics, reason, science, and logic to complete our understanding of the world.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The paradox was found in set theory, in what may sound like logical wordplay games. A set could not contain all sets because it cannot contain (or be consistent with) itself. G\u00f6del found that not only was a paradox present, but a paradox must <\/i>be present. It serves some critical function in the structure of our universe.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I believe it is in this paradox, within this mystery, where God exists.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Whether my belief is correct or not is, of course, irrelevant. It is a belief, like any other. It helps me during the dark nights of the soul; it soothes me when I look into my children\u2019s eyes and see pain or confusion; it steels me when I face the harder, coarser roads in life. I believe God is the paradox which completes our function. I know that G\u00f6del found a lacking in science to resolve our questions of non-being. I believe, like C\u0103rt\u0103rescu, that these questions belong not to the Sciences, but to literature and the Arts. Humanities, we called them.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201c\u2026I knew better than anyone that delirium is not the detritus of reality but a part of reality itself, sometimes the most precious part.\u201d [pg. 63]<\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n In Solenoid, in my own private reading, I found a strange fortuity. I followed its thread. I tried to read carefully, for the signs. Irina, the physics teacher at the Bucharest high school and the narrator\u2019s lover, asks him: \u201cWhat would you do if you could save one thing only from a burning building, and you had to choose between a famous painting and a newborn child?\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The question comes up again and again in Solenoid<\/i> and permeates the text. It is a question I knew very well, and had just recently permeated my own life + work.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n In the pages of Characters<\/i><\/a>, the debut novel I was book touring and podcasting on, traipsing around the country trying to find my readers, I unraveled (through the dirty lens of auto-fiction also traversed by C\u0103rt\u0103rescu in Solenoid<\/i>) the disintegration of a lifelong friendship. The beginning of the end came when my friend, upset that I had written auto-fiction<\/a> about people and places he knew, asked me a version of the same question, one he had found in a Paris Review<\/i> interview with Karl Knausgaard.<\/p>\n