“He is taking literature to new heights.”
“Claes Wahlin on Mircea Cartarescu – a Shakespeare for our time”
“There are authors whose work is usually described as a world of its own, the literary universe, and the like metaphors, hoping to provide a clue about the strange texts they create. So I want to do with Mircea Cartarescus novels, where these parables bordering to become literal.”
“Perhaps more than ever, this is relevant for the Inger Johansson heroically translated Solenoid, a work of about 800 pages where the namnlöse the narrator moves from the very smallest to the very largest – also it literally.”
“It starts with he’s got lice, again. It ends with the whole of the Bucharest highlights and reveals an underworld that is all fasors source. In between we get scenes from the narrator’s life from birth in 1956, the same year of birth as Cartarescu, until his adult life. He writes his memories in order to explain its anomalies.”
“nnRomanen can be called autofiktion, but then in the highest division where writers like Marcel Proust, also are. Solenoid is a text at the same time to take distance from all the literature, an ongoing project where he wants to write away from the art, out of itself and beyond the world.”
“the Narrator is working as a school teacher in Bucharest during the Ceausescu-era, a position he is forced to come to terms with the after författarplanerna wrecked at a reading of his förstlingsverk the Case as a teenager. Lärarlivet is depressing: nasty, insektsliknande children, appalling colleagues and working days, which is the one plague after the other. His commitment is in the writing of the text we are reading.”
“The previously read Cartarescu, above all, the Diary 1994-2003, recognize, several of the biographical circumstances. This will return many of these, but inverted, as a kind of from – or underside. It figures not just a twin who must have died as an infant in unclear circumstances, but on several occasions the father, also the narrator out against all these authors who seek to bestow comfort and guidance with their literature, all those who (like Cartarescu himself, celebrates, traveling around the readings, and to be praised. The narrator can be perceived as the author’s distorted mirror image, an anti-Cartarescu.”
“A solenoid, the coil in casual speech, is an electromagnet that generates a magnetic field by which it can move or lift metal objects. In Cartarescus novel is these concrete and gigantic, placed in the ground around in Bucharest. The quirky house he inhabits stands atop one of these, which he mainly uses to soar freely when he is sleeping. But solenoiderna has more features, which may not be revealed.”
“the Novel seeks to cover not only the whole of the known world, from mites and insects to celestial bodies, but also the dreams and the strange nedfärder to the hidden room behind the doors to other dimensions, worlds beyond the categories that are limited by our senses and our thinking. “
“It wants to be a bible, a divine comedy and helvetesskildring on one and the same time. It drills down to the foundations of the earth, asking questions about the gods, if the man is in the same relation to the universe which the insects are to man – unaware of what life and the like that surrounds her. The misery, the sorrow and the pain takes a big place in this epic landscaped and blackened dirge of life’s unknown and painful condition.”
“A statement as the above is unfortunately a pale shadow of what it means to read the novel. The winding of the language first and foremost, all of the original parables, how sentence after sentence at the same time can accommodate the smallest and the largest. “
“the Description of the wretched place that bears the name of Bucharest with its ugly, dirty, and nasty individuals that move around the narrator’s life is given a surreal pregnans which, nevertheless, does not leave the realism to the full. The text suggestionskraft is significant.”
“nn”Solenoid” is nothing less than a work that has the same level of ambition as a Dante, a Kafka or a Shakespeare. The narrator may take measurements from the literature, but the text strösslar with allusions and quotations from the classics. If Cartarescu has reached there, only the future can tell, but in the here and now appear to be Solenoid as a significant literary work in one of the contemporary major writings. Like a solenoid lifts Cartarescu the contemporary literature to literally unprecedented heights.”
“Trans. Inger Johansson”
“Albert Bonniers förlag”
