Monsterpieces: Cartarescu's Solenoid

[From the August dog days of my New York City staycation comes the following review of a doggedly long monster-minded novel that won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025.]

Someone I know, but didn’t know me very well, told me I should read Mircea Cartarescu’s 639-page novel Solenoid (translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter) for Monsterpieces. The book is full of monsters like the “teratological” museum the narrator/protagonist visits: “adolescents with two sexes, androgynes with conical breasts and purple penises, a uterus sliced open to reveal the infant that seemed to threaten you with its fist” and “countless other effigies of human unhappiness,” all functioning as the “counterweight” . . . “to the sunlit side of the world.” That last also describes the weighty Solenoid.

Cartarescu’s narrator, a native of Bucharest writing in the mid 80s, says early on that he doesn’t fear “beastly monsters,” only the “void, the nothing, the unseen.” But the narrator continually has monsters on his mind. He uses “monstrous” to describe his body, his dreams, strange mechanisms he discovers, ruined buildings outside his room, the universe, the imagination of the Creator. He believes we face a long line of monsters after death. Poe, Carroll, and Nabokov are “illuminated monsters” because of their interest in young girls. Worst are the “absolute monsters, monsters of the psyche” that appear even in daylight. One exhibit in that museum mentioned above is the exceedingly long penis—a “veiny monstrosity”—of a dead bandit named Terente. On the penis is a “tattoo of a long and flowery obscenity.” I wondered if the penis was a witty metafictional metaphor of the lengthy, small-print Solenoid.

Cartarescu takes a monstrous rhetorical risk with his obsessive and hyperbolic narrator who early on discusses the attraction of a magnet and the repulsion of two magnets brought near each other. A solenoid is a device using magnetic force. The first half of Solenoid repels, true to the masochistic/aggressive persona of its narrator. Some of the second half attracts, and I’ll explain why. But just so you know what and how much you will need to survive (or skim), I’ll describe the first half in detail.

The narrator admits to what he calls “anomalies” as he writes his autobiography over several years. “Anomalies” is one of his few understatements in this encyclopedia of exaggeration, and I wondered if the word was the narrator’s or the translator’s euphemism for “abnormalities.” The never-named narrator resents being born, mourns a twin brother who died at one, dislikes being dressed as a girl for several years, repeatedly describes being traumatized by simply being a child, suffers multiple health problems, hates his body and his father, obsessively reads every kind of book, and has no friends. And all this is just while he is living with his parents. Then, in his more recent past, and in the present of his writing he has a paranoid imagination and dreams that exceed it. Many, many dreams from childhood on that he recorded in his diary and is now retelling in this “notebook” that is Solenoid but not, he insists, a novel. Since an epic poem he wrote was mocked by fellow writing students, the narrator mocks literature and prizes only investigations of “reality.” Maybe that should be in double quotes because the narrator’s reality (once amusingly misprinted as “realty”) is quite obviously distorted or clearly imagined and is presented in a style of too-late-Romantic decadence, not obscene like the penis tattoo but “flowery,” florid, prolix, and abstruse. He often piles on adjectives as in my last sentence. Without any apparent irony, the narrator dismisses earlier proponents of dream revelations—such as Poe—because they “often wrote too affectedly and poorly.”

Solenoid has numerous early references to nineteenth-century and twentieth-century European masters of surreal horror and hyperreal despair with Kafka most often mentioned. But Solenoid kept reminding me of the American who did that material first—Poe—so I was happy to see him name-checked in the novel. Reading the first half of the book is like reading Poe’s collected stories, including his pseudo-science essay “Eureka,” over and over and over. Even the detective stories because the narrator thinks of himself as a cosmic investigator. Throw in Poe’s essay on “animal magnetism” that discusses galvanic electricity dictating human activity. Poe was a hoaxer and parodist. Could the frequency of the monstrous in Solenoid make it a parody of the doomed American parodist? And a send-up of those European imagineers of emotional pain and intellectual suffering? That would be a monster anti-literary project for sure, but maybe too narrow to be a monsterpiece.

Solenoid has a sequence of events over a few years but not really a plot. Other humans are caricatured by the narrator, but he is the only character. Time is flexible. The narrator gives two different birthdates, but he appears to be in his mid 30s in the years of the book’s present. Space is also flexible. The house where the poor narrator lives has, he says, an uncountable number of rooms. Bucharest is like a Gothic fiction with dark threatening streets, decaying houses, run-down schools, abandoned factories with mysterious objects, dangerous gypsies. The narrator’s home is built over a solenoid producing energy that somehow allows his lover and him to float above the bed when having sex. In a way, the narrator’s abstraction and paranoia have him almost always figuratively floating above and looking down on the city, his life, and the lives of his colleagues at the school where he teaches children he fears. Come to think of it, he fears everything now that, like the fetal and fearful narrator of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” he is born.

I love Poe a little at a time, his ability to deceive readers and engage psychoanalysts. But the kinds of information that move Poe’s characters and stories and Solenoid—the stuff of delusions, nightmares, and fantasies—are not (in my not so humble opinion) the kinds of information that give contemporary monsterpiece fictions their intellectual weight and substantial effect, their relations to masterpieces. Consider the difference between Poe’s only novel, the sea-faring fantasy/hoax Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the cetology-dense Moby-Dick. Of works on this Substack, the two Elkins novels about crazed scientists are probably closest to Solenoid. Though obsessed and sometimes manic, Elkins’ protagonists are grounded in contemporary scientific information and exist within social circumstances that keep their narrations from floating off, like Cartarescu’s, into the realm of dark fantasy. In monsterpieces—with yet again Gravity’s Rainbow as the best example—varieties of actual specialized information cause complexity and ambiguity—and uncertainty in the minds of their characters. The mind of Solenoid’s narrator is not uncertain. It is fixated, horrified by its certainty that human life is monstrous. Trapped within this mind for a long while, readers may identify his delusions, sympathize with his desperate sadness, understand why Cartarescu might want to create such a hyper-sensitive character as a critique of Ceaușescu’s Marxist and materialist Romania, but ultimately the protagonist is—for this reader— alien, not just alienated from everyday life but like a literal alien dropped down from some other planet and searching for a way to escape earth (without dying). The irony is that this tortured alien with the overwrought prose is like the energy-producing but unreliable solenoids around Bucharest. After a long assault of wired prose by a solitary narrator, I thought of “solenoid” as a portmanteau of “sole” and “paranoid” even though Cartarescu’s title identifies the work as science fiction.

Cartarescu doubles down on the risk of creating an alien character by choosing an alienating method of excess. Throughout Solenoid but particularly in the first half that method is repetition. Cararescu repeats situations, observations, interpretations, hallucinations, and other -ations in a monstrous display of obsessive compulsion. These repetitions are appropriate for the narrator but of limited artistic functionality after about 300 pages. Repetition reaches its extreme nadir with seven pages filled with only the word “help.” Writing his notebook comes to be the purpose of the narrator’s life, but he states he has no interest in possible readers, so he goes on and on, with apparent impunity. But readers may not. They may not repeatedly accept the gambit of early repulsion. As the responsible proprietor of Monsterpieces, I pressed on and on to the end through a surfeit of passages like the following, which is a mere excerpt from a longer disquisition:

“Why, in hypnagogic moments, when we are lying in bed between two worlds, incompletely free from the dream of reality and incompletely captured by the reality of dreams, do frightening monsters and visions of hell rise from this room? Fangs, gaping jaws, eyes injected with hate, giant crab claws and venomous scorpion tails, devils and dragons and terrible beasts flood our incendiary visual field, hordes coming from the depths of forests and the cores of stars and the ends of the earth, in order to tear out mind to pieces.”

[Don’t tell anyone I said so, but at times Cartarescu sets off in italics the narrator’s dreams, which allows for easy skimming or skipping.]

In the novel’s second half, attractions do periodically break through the narrator’s Sturm und Drang. He describes a group called the Picketists who stage protests against mortality. “Down With Death” one of their signs says. It’s a populist movement that predated our current billionaires’ immortality projects. [The novel was published in Romania in 2015.]. The narrator also spends numerous pages describing in, for him, almost documentary fashion the many months he spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium, a mini Magic Mountain in which nature does not horrify him and he makes a friend. The narrator even gives some pages to a few months of happy life with his bride. The flashbacks may not be monsterpiece material, but they do partly explain the melodramatically morose earlier sections.

It’s in lengthy sections praising the books of intellectual forerunners and influences that Solenoid most resembles the varieties of scientific theory and dense information found in, for examples, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, the novels of Richard Powers, and a chaos theory-influenced work not discussed on Monsterpieces—Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men. Cartarescu and his narrator devote relatively objective pages to the work of Charles Howard Hinton who coined the term “tesseract” and theorized a possible fourth dimension—and even more solid pages to the Romanian psychologist Nicolae Vaschide who worked with Binet and who wrote books investigating the phenomenon of dreams (before he developed schizophrenia). Both scientists earn respect from the narrator because their works attempt to escape the mundane and mortal reality he finds monstrous. For the narrator, Hinton and Vaschide are like solenoids: they offer intellectual elevation, floating above the quotidian like the sexual elevation the narrator has experienced. Even if the narrator is not in his right mind, Cartarescu can use his reading as information to suggest that transcending the “saddest city on earth” might be possible. Is that a good idea? Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow would say transcendence is a desperate and destructive delusion, a judgment perhaps recognized at the novel’s end when the whole of Bucharest horrifically rises above the earth.

Also near the end of Solenoid are many pages about the Voynich manuscript, a copy of which is given to the narrator. The manuscript is a real fifteenth-century hybrid document of more than 200 pages of undecipherable writing and strange illustrations. [It’s interesting enough to read about on Wikipedia; one theory is that it was a hoax]. In the seventeenth century, the narrator says the manuscript was “new evidence of the world’s baroque monstrosity.” Cartarescu doesn’t do much with the manuscript his narrator calls “monstrous.” It is a model of the world as unknowable cipher for the narrator. But not really a model of Solenoid because, despite its many monsters and existential conundrums, the novel is too knowable, too repeatedly reported and explicated by its narrator, too similar to other literary works of disgust and despair. Cartarescu’s repeated use of “monstrous” and “monster” is one indicator of the novel’s knowable reductivism despite its apparent multifariousness.

Before Cartarescu’s apocalyptic finale, he provides one last solenoid-enabled tour de force or farce when the narrator agrees to be strapped into a solenoid in order to join the kingdom of mites. Even these extremely small beings are described as “monstrous.” Down in miteland, the narrator, now himself a mite, understands mites’ bodies, their ways, and their “tenderness and abjection.” Among the mites, he becomes a Jesus figure who is misunderstood and eventually torn apart—but fortunately the solenoid can save him, bring him back from his mission, perhaps a better large being, one who appreciates his new lover and daughter and is therefore given an unlikely happy ending by Cartarescu. At the end of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the protagonist and a few shipmates in an open boat are saved (we know since Pym survived to tell the tale) by a mysterious huge white figure, Poe’s deus ex machina surprise happy ending. I’m not claiming influence, just saying to have some suspicion and a sense of humor if you choose to read Solenoid.

Cartarescu has reportedly said that he never revised Solenoid. That’s easy to believe. I’m a sucker for imitative form, but given Cartarescu’s narrator and materials I finally found Solenoid a monstrosity of repetition but not a monsterpiece because I came to believe that authorial self-indulgence, rather than formal and intellectual ambition, was responsible for much of the novel’s excess and length. Cartarescu several times alludes to the non-linear scientist Benoit Mandelbrot, describer of fractal organization. In decades to come, scholars may be able to train A.I. to uncover elegant and exquisite and unrecognized—and even profound—fractal orders in Solenoid. I won’t be around to quibble with the scholars, but they will still have to defend an overheated and overextended Poe-tic prose. In a way, this science fiction is an historical fiction treating a slightly removed past (the 1970s and 1980s) in rather far removed style that blurs the impoverishment of Romanians in the decades depicted.

Judgments such as mine here exist on a sliding scale. From Solenoid, I slid off. But if you think Solenoid might be just the kind of novel that will keep you fascinated with Romanian abjection, you can find online much more informative and sympathetic reviews than this short notice. The reviews are consistently positive, so my judgment of Solenoid is a minority position. It could, of course, be wrong. Another possibility is that reviewers—when assigned a huge and extremely literary novel, particularly one critical of a Communist tyrant—compare such a work to the usual run of what I call “midfiction” or “commercialit” and leap on the rave train. Here at Monsterpieces, I compare long literary novels to the best long literary novels. Solenoid is definitely long like that exhibited penis, but comes up short in performance, in originality. To my surprise, none of the reviewers I read thought Solenoid might be a parody, a hoax. If it is, Cartarescu was laughing, as it used to be said before direct deposits, all the way to the bank with his 75,000-euro Dublin Literary Award.