Nothing Is Strange to a Child: On Solenoid
Lice came before the fourth dimension in Cărtărescu’s Solenoid. The novel opens at the protagonist’s scalp, where metaphysics touches skin. Before the buried solenoids and levitating bodies, there is a schoolteacher, over a sink, combing lice from his hair and noticing, with horrible calm, the shared organic indignity of their bodies and his. Revelation grows from itch; cosmic escape begins as infestation. The surreal and the metaphysical stem from the real and physical. Moving deeper through the pages of Solenoid, however, makes one realise quickly that surrealism is too clean a word for what Cărtărescu has created. Surrealism assumes a stable reality later breached by dream. Solenoid hangs from a more extreme position: the normal reality is the same thing as the strange dream.
Cărtărescu lays this bare in Solenoid:
Nothing is strange to a child, because he lives in the strange; thus dreams and old memories seem made from the same substance. (p. 148)
Childhood, in this formulation, has little to do with innocence, nostalgia, or a decorative reservoir of wonder. It is a cognitive condition before the world’s appearances and happenings have been sorted into permissible and impermissible categories; before dream, memory, shame, illness, hallucination, and fact have been assigned to separate drawers. The adult mind, schooled by language, fear, work, embarrassment, and the ordinary police force called ‘other people’, later declares that sorting sanity. Cărtărescu writes from before the drawers close.
That is why the loose category of surrealism only gets one so far. It still thinks in terms of breach: reality here, dream there, impossibility arriving as a foreign body. Solenoid’s premise is more radical. Irina floating above the bed is not a violation of the room so much as one of the room’s hidden laws becoming briefly visible; the solenoids beneath Bucharest do not make the city strange so much as expose the fact that its ordinary surfaces were never sufficient. The impossible events arrive less as intrusions than as belated evidence that the world was never settled.
This principle governs everything that follows. The rest of the novel tests it by dissolving one category after another — city and body, fact and fiction, biography and counterfactual, flesh and metaphysics: each dissolution turning out, on inspection, to be the same operation at a different scale. Cărtărescu’s world does not feel false. It feels too thin for the pressure inside it, as though another version of existence were pressing against this one, separated by bare skin, language, architecture, and some missing word we were never taught to pronounce. One reads Solenoid and begins to distrust one’s own furniture.
One reads Solenoid and begins
to distrust one’s own furniture.
The first category to dissolve is the line between city and body. Cărtărescu has said, in a 2022 interview, that he recreated and invented Bucharest, making it an alter ego, a twin, a state of mind. The book’s Bucharest is not ‘realistic city plus supernatural disturbance’. It is tramlines, factories, hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, vacant lots, libraries, and childhood routes already distorted by attention. The boat-shaped house, the hidden solenoids, Irina levitating above the bed, Palamar’s library and its mites under the lens, the school that expands into nightmarish corridors: each scene feels like a local exposure of the city’s tissue. When the protagonist follows tram 21 to the edge of Bucharest, or moves through school corridors that feel secreted rather than built, setting turns into organ. The city’s topography becomes indistinguishable from the topography of thought because Cărtărescu has made thought topographical in the first place: routed, blocked, infected, electrified, full of chambers one did not know one had entered. Inside and outside fail together.
The next boundary to go is the one between fact and invention. Reading Solenoid, one repeatedly loses confidence in the distance between Cărtărescu’s creations and the historical record. Ethel Lilian Voynich, for example, first enters through The Gadfly, then the name opens into Wilfrid Voynich and the unreadable manuscript. On my first encounter with the Voynich manuscript inside Solenoid, I presumed it was simply another of Cărtărescu’s inventions; only later did I learn about the real mystery. Such facts in this novel (Charles Hinton’s fourth dimension, Nicolae Vaschide’s hanging experiments, the Voynich folios passing through Palamar’s hands) feel like objects that have passed through dream and returned with their surfaces changed. Knowledge and hallucination stop being opposites.
The same doubling reaches biography. The protagonist’s failed poem matters more than plot summary makes it sound. In the novel, The Fall is humiliated at the Workshop of the Moon and the protagonist thereafter becomes a schoolteacher. In Federico Perelmuter’s account, the fictional The Fall shadows Cărtărescu’s The Levant: the real workshop reception was rapturous where the protagonist’s is ruinous. This is not a clever autobiographical key. It is the book’s metaphysics at the scale of a life. A doubled city finds its narrator in a doubled biography; the book is built from the branch that did not happen, or perhaps from the life that literary institutions refused to certify.
Cărtărescu’s handling of the protagonist’s failure also refuses the easy novelistic consolation. The cheap version makes failure a romance: rejection purifies the artist, success is made vulgar by comparison. Solenoid takes a different route. Failure makes its narrator porous, open to resentment, revelation, tenderness, grandiosity, self-pity, disgust, and forms of attention that a cleaner life might have sealed off. Porosity is its own category-failure: the narrator cannot keep his emotional states in separate compartments any more than Bucharest can keep its surfaces from splitting open.
Then comes the deepest dissolution: mind and body. I was surprised, reading the Chicago Review interview, to find Cărtărescu invoking soma sema (the body as prison) to describe Solenoid. After hundreds of pages of dissolved categories, here was the author reaching for one of the oldest dualisms in philosophy. My materialist reflex, much reinforced by his version of Bucharest, resists the clean separation. Mind happens as body, through history, environment, appetite, injury, and other people. Yet the phenomenology of imprisonment is real. One can reject the soul-body partition and still feel the insult of embodiment: a capacity for infinity tied to skin, sweat, spinal pain, teeth, infection, appetite, decay. The point is not that the body is a prison in the Platonic sense, but that the body produces the exact feeling that makes the Platonic metaphor persuasive. Cărtărescu’s materialism is stranger than Plato’s dualism: the cage and the desire to escape the cage are made of the same tissue.
Here body-horror in Solenoid becomes structural rather than decorative. The body gives the metaphysical problem its evidence and its insult. Lice, mites, sweat, navels, dental shame, bodily fluids, illness, the obscene smallness of organisms: Cărtărescu keeps dragging transcendence back through pores. The fourth dimension matters because the third dimension has teeth, skin, infection. The desire to escape existence is generated by existence at its most intimate.
How does the novel hold all of this (childhood, city, failure, body, escape) without collapsing into catalogue? Ben Hooyman’s labyrinth is the right spatial metaphor for the bewilderment, but a labyrinth only describes how one gets lost. The title’s object describes how the novel holds.
The solenoid under the house matters first as an object: the thing itself, the hum beneath the ordinary, the force that warps the floorboards and lifts a woman from her bed. But the device also gives the novel its syntax. A solenoid is a coil that produces a magnetic field when current passes through it; Cărtărescu builds narrative current the same way, by making recurrence generate force. At first the returns seem almost formal: episode coils around episode, dream around memory, the fictional Bucharest around the historical one. Then the loops begin to carry ethical and conceptual friction. Failed life coils around successful life; science around mysticism; disgust around tenderness; longing for transcendence around the body that produces the longing. The movement is induction rather than ordinary progression. Repeated scenes accumulate charge before they disclose a system. This is why every category-failure I have described feels like the same operation: the novel is a coil, and each recurrence adds to the field.
[Solenoid] makes ordinary categories fail,
then lets that failure become a way of seeing.
That principle also explains why Solenoid feels irreducible to plot. The book’s true unit is not the event but the charged scene: the poetry humiliation, the classrooms, the endless corridors, Colentina and the factories along the tramline, the impossible domestic machinery of the house, Palamar’s mites under the lens, the sense that Bucharest has always had an underside waiting for the right pressure. Even the most outlandish images retain a practical texture: a button pressed, a route followed, a body placed under observation, a manuscript card found in a library catalogue. These scenes do not assemble into argument in a linear way. They slowly alter what the reader is willing to accept as evidence.
If the book’s meanings keep pressing against available language, translation becomes its final test, and another boundary that turns out to be permeable. Sean Cotter’s English is inseparable from that pressure. I do not read Romanian; my Cărtărescu is therefore necessarily Cotter’s Cărtărescu. I cannot judge fidelity from outside his language. I can judge whether the English has pulse, density, and pressure. A novel like this could die in translation in several ways: it could become all ornament and no pulse, all archive and no fever, all strangeness smoothed into prestige-literary mist. Cotter’s English keeps the sentences dense without making them airless. It also preserves inquiry, the sense that every object has to be touched, worried, opened, suspected.
Having translated enough to recognise the doubleness, I trust the evidence available to me: that the English itself has pulse. The sentence that grants this review of mine its title, for instance, has to sound almost childishly plain while carrying a metaphysical insult; much of the book asks for that doubleness, and Cotter manages, seemingly effortlessly, to hold both registers at once. He keeps childhood plainness and metaphysical weight in friction, scholarship and hallucination, the archive and the dream, without letting either side smooth into the other. The English does not flatten the strangeness into prestige-literary mist, nor does it exoticise Solenoid into a foreign curiosity. It simply lets the sentences breathe, on the only evidence available to me: that the English itself has pulse.
Solenoid is one of the great reading experiences of my life. Across nearly seven hundred pages, the book did not give me a system. It gave me a way of suspecting one: press hard enough on reality’s walls and something might answer from the other side. After the drawers had been pulled open and emptied onto the floor, I found I was willing, again, to take the strange seriously. That is closer than I expected to come, in adult life, to childhood.
