Solo - Hardcover

Dasgupta, Rana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0547397089 ISBN 13: 9780547397085

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

Synopsis

With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams—and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.

Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, the real and imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.

“Utterly unforgettable in its humanity.” —The Guardian

About this title

From the Inside Flap

With imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century through the story of a hundred-yearold blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that confirms the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.

Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, the real and the imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.

Reviews

Starred Review. Winner of the U.K.'s Commonwealth Prize, Dasgupta's second book (after Tokyo Canceled) is bold, enigmatic, and thought-provoking. After his pragmatic father crushes Ulrich's passion for music, he turns to chemistry, a subject that takes him to Berlin, "the capital of world science," during the ebb of the Ottoman Empire. He works alongside researchers on the forefront of discovery and shares the halls with Albert Einstein. But WWI forces him back home to Bulgaria and into a bookkeeping job at a chemical plant, where years of political upheavals leading to communism drive Ulrich into a private world of experimentation that ends decades later when he's blinded in an accident. Yet his mind remains very much alive, and the "second movement" of the book reveals a richly imagined world involving a Bulgarian musical prodigy, an American executive, and Georgian siblings whose lives all intersect in New York. With this ambitious structure, Dasgupta's subtle architecture gives rise to questions of modernity, memory, and human failures. Lucid prose and a narrative scheme both demanding and inchoate reveal a writer beginning to deploy his considerable powers. (Feb.)
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Following his critically acclaimed debut, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), Dasgupta presents two loosely connected novels. The first, set in Bulgaria, follows Ulrich, from privileged boyhood at the dawn of the last century to destitute old age. As decades evaporate in a whirl of revolution, war, and political upheaval, Ulrich’s possibilities shrink and his life grows increasingly narrow. Yet the meagerness of his circumstances belies the richness of his inner daydreams, which form the second half of the novel. A new set of characters, vividly imagined by Ulrich, ultimately collide in modern-day New York. (One is a writer, allowing Dasgupta to flex his considerable poetic talent.) The first half moves at a stately pace, while the second throbs to a twenty-first-century beat, with pieces of Ulrich’s real life cleverly repurposed to create an echo effect. With an intriguing bifurcated storytelling device, this is a novel of dazzling ideas and emotion in which Dasgupta comes to astonishingly beautiful and original conclusions about love, loss, and aging, and his protagonist realizes “There is far more to us than what we live.” --Patty Wetli

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0547397089
• ISBN 13: 9780547397085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 339