Solenoid

Cartarescu, Mircea

ISBN 10: 1646052021 / ISBN 13: 9781646052028

Published by Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022

First US edition, 2nd printing, inscribed by the author. Seller Inventory # ABE-1732214916315

Synopsis:

WINNER of the Dublin Literary Award 2024 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2022

LONGLISTED for the International Booker Prize 2025

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Financial Times, Words Without Borders

A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding, Solenoid is an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths.

Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life, while on a broad scale Solenoid's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines attempt to reconcile the realms of life and art. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis preventorium, encounters with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. One character asks another: When you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork?

Combining fiction with autobiography and history—Nikola Tesla and Charles Hinton, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.

About the Author:

Mircea Cărtărescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter's English translation.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T.O. Bobe’s Curl and Nichita Stănescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. His translation of Magda Cârneci's FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Solenoid
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication Date: 2022
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)
Edition: 1st Edition