The story is about a Romanian teacher, unhappy in the school where he works, single, tormented and suddenly on the brink of disclosing a technological mystery that is hidden in the dark city of Bucharest. The city stands as a kind of allegory for the world, with the technological mystery under the city potentially referring to the mysteries of the universe. The novel branches out in different directions, like a Pynchon novel (especially "Gravity's Rainbow" comes to mind), with side-stories on the Voynich manuscript, on the Gadfly, on Nicola Tesla and George Boole.
Even if no time is specified, the book describes a dark and somber life under the communist dictatorship of Ceaucescu, in which people are trapped in the city with no hope of escape. Writing and art are a way of escape, of getting out of the darkness, a hidden door to another universe.
"I would like this text to be that kind of a page, one of the billions of human skins covered by infected, suppurating letters, bound in the book of the horror of living. Anonymous like all the others. Because my anomalies, however unusual they are, do not overshadow the tragic anomaly of the spirit dressed in flesh. And the one thing I want you to read on my skin, you, who will never read it, is a single cry, repeated page after page: "Leave! Run away! Remember you are not from here!" But I am not writing for someone to read me, I am writing to try to understand what is happening to me, what labyrinth I am in, whose test I am subject to, and how I can answer to get out whole. Writing about my past and my anomalies and my translucid life, which reveals a motionless architecture, I try to make out the rules of this game, to distinguish the signs, to put them together and to figure out where they are pointing, so I can go in that direction. No book has any meaning if it is not a Gospel. A prisoner on death row could have his cell lined with bookshelves, all wonderful books, but what he actually needs is an escape plan." (p. 211)
Bucharest stands for human existence, its narrow place in time and space:
"I live inside my skull, my world extends as far as its porous, yellow walls, and it consists, almost entirely, of a floating Bucharest, carved in there like the temples chiseled into the pink cliffs at Petra. Stuck like a fibroma to my meninges, at the far edge of my left temporal lobe, is Voila. The rest is ghostly speculation, the science of reflection and refraction through translucid media. My world is Bucharest, the saddest city on the face of the earth, but at the same time, the only true one. In contrast to all the other cities I've been told existalthough it is absurd to believe in Beirut, where you'll never go-Bucharest is the product of a gigantic mind; it appeared all at once, the result of a single person's attempt to produce the only city that can say something about humanity. Like Saint Petersburg and Brasilia, Bucharest has no history, it only mimics history. The legendary architect of the city pondered the best way for an urban agglomeration to reflect, most truly and most deeply, humanity's terrible fate, the grand tragedy and everlasting disappointment of our tribe. The constructor of Bucharest planned it all as it appears today, with every building, every empty lot, every interior, every twilight reflection in the circular windows in the middle of the timeworn pediments. His genius was to build a city already in ruin, the only city where people should live." (p245)
And the individual's chance of escape is almost impossible:
"Enfin, I sometimes think that, by digging my escape tunnel for decades on end, throwing behind me, like a metaphysical mole, cubic meters of earth, I will finally reach, like an unhappy and hirsute Abbe Faria, not a godly exterior space under infinite skies, but his cell, just as suffocating, just as infested with the smell of spoiled cabbage, as claustrophobic, and as buried in the core of the giant fortress as my own. There won't be anything we can do, other than hug and cry, and then rot, two skeletons embracing in decomposed rags, like the dried fly husks and legs in spiderwebs. All the difference between success and failure, life and art, edifices and ruins, light and dark-annihilated by exterminating time, time that takes no prisoners." (p.434)
Literature as we know it, is likely to fail, unless it also takes up some other dimension:
"What I am writing here, evening after evening, in my house in the center of my city, of my universe, of my world, is an anti-book, the forever obscure work of an anti-author. I am no one and I will stay that way, I am alone and there's no cure for being alone"(p 492)
"''Art has no meaning if it's not an escape. If it's not born of a prisoner's despair. I can't respect any art that comforts and relieves, those novels and music and paintings designed to make your prison more bearable. I don't want to paint miniature Tuileries Gardens on the bulging walls, and I don't want to paint the barrel in the corner some particular shade of pink. I want to see the circus horsewoman as she is: tubercular and flea-infested, sleeping with anyone who gives her a glass of absinthe. I want to be able to see the grates on the high transom, through which no sunray falls to destroy the vision. I want to understand my situation lucidly and cynically. We are all prisoners inside multiple concentric prisons. I am the prisoner of my mind, which is the prisoner of my body, which is the prisoner of the world." (p. 546)
But somewhere, somehow, out of this ominous and dreary existence, hope is possible:
"He will be able to raise me from the dead, because he will see that in the future, I will be raised from the dead by him. For him, my world will be eternally frozen, without freedom of movement or conscience, without free will-the most inhumane of oubliettes a sadistic and perverse demon could imagine. He will see me closed within the amber of my destiny, locked in my own statue, a living mind in an eternally paralyzed body, like those inside a photo or a film where, no matter how often you see them, nothing new ever happens. It is the frightening world you must escape, the tomb where you rot while living, the chrysalis from which you must break out to become a butterfly.For this to happen, a crack must appear somewhere in the block of amber that encases you. A defect in the machinery of statistical predictions. The coin falls almost half the time on one side and almost half the time on the other. But it is not a disk with only two sides, rather, it is a very short cylinder, hiding another dimension between its faces, hiding its thickness, slight but not completely negligible. Every few thousand or tens of thousands of tosses, the coin lands on its edge, even on a surface as uniform as endless marble. It stays there, standing up, after it twists and turns a while, clinking against the soft surface, fighting against all the statistical demons. Sometimes, very rarely, you wrestle with the angel and emerge unscathed. All our hopes hang from this impossibility, this crack in the world's enamel, otherwise so unforgivingly uniform. Whenever we flip a coin, we hope it will land on its edge. Irina, like all the other children that come into the world from love and chance, are the cruel, blind coin landing on its edge, impossibilities becoming realities, miracles that prove escape is possible. Encrusted within the amber of the big Irina, little Irina is already there, she already devours her mother from within, like an ichneumon larva, and, in six months, she will emerge triumphant, tender, and sweet, with shining eyes, leaving big Irina behind like a snake shedding its skin. This is the story of our people: women coming out of women coming out of women coming out of women, in a chain of explosions of life and beauty, but also of endless cruelty. It is an uninterrupted line of goddesses with two faces: one of a child regarding the future, the other of an old woman, wearing a tragic mask, rent and bleeding from parturition, who strains to read our fortune in the stains of our aleatory past." (p.595)
"Solenoid" is a huge book, both voluminous as meaningful. The writing is ambitious, with a very baroque and often bombastic style, but it is sustained, relevant and powerful. It brings literature to another dimension of writing, more than a therapeutic, also an existential necessity, a radical re-invention of the novel. Cărtărescu's single focused writing, the composed voice of his lead charachter is as mad as the world he describes, yet it is also heart-rending and deep. It somehow reduces other novels I read this year into small-town petty endeavours.
I can only encourage readers to keep reading and allow yourself to be swallowed up by his universe and the mesmerising journey Cărtărescu takes you on.
No comments:
Post a Comment