Solenoid
Praise for Nostalgia
“Cărtărescu’s themes are immense. They reveal to us a secret Bucharest, folded into underground passages far from the imperious summons of history, which never stops calling to us.”
—Edgar Reichmann, Le Monde
“A wonderful labyrinth of language and color. Cartarescu, one of Romania’s foremost poets and novelists, gives us a novel filled with surprises and the unexpected.”
—Peter Constantine, author of The Purchased Bride, translator of Isaac Babel
“Read this book, then read it again.”
—Christopher Byrd, San Francisco Chronicle
“Gripping, impassioned, unexpected—the qualities that the best in literature possesses.”
—Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Praise for Blinding
“Cărtărescu’s fluid formalism translates all into some of the most imaginative literature since that of the masters mentioned by name in the text (Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar, among others).”
—Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus
“Blinding expands inward, plumbing the infinite depths of an individual imagination. It’s as though Cartarescu has chosen to withdraw from any topical literary or cultural conversation, and that rather than attempting to stitch together a fragmented contemporary reality, he is returning to a time that never actually existed, an imaginary time when all genres were one genre and all discourses one discourse, before everything broke into parts.”
—Martin Riker, London Review of Books
“If George Lucas were a poet, this is how he would write.”
—New York Sun
“Cartarescu’s phantasmagorical world is similar to Dalí’s dreamscapes.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Cartarescu is] a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few.”
—Andrei Codrescu, author of The Poetry Lesson
“His novel is nothing less than a cathedral of imagination and erudition … This masterwork of mannerism is guaranteed to catapult Mircea Cartarescu to the highest echelons of European literature.”
—Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“Stitched into the multi-stranded fabric of Blinding is a tender, mesmerically precise account of a humble Bucharest upbringing and its formative effects … Above all, Blinding insists that memory can make a world … Cartarescu has fashioned a novel of visionary intensity.”
—Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
“The reader is invited to embrace this feeling of overwhelming comprehension, this comprehensive vision exceeding life and imagination. As Borges said when Joyce’s Ulysses was published, this text does not aspire to be a novel, but a cathedral.”
—Bogdan Suceavă, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Visionary, surreal, convoluted, far-reaching (perhaps overreaching), Cărtărescu’s first volume concludes with a spiritual call-to-arms, in which creativity and fertility are one and the same. This vision imparts beauty to this destiny, but there are also intimations throughout of power misused, of violence, of beings struggling for connection in the face of obstacles.”
—The Quarterly Conversation
MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU
Solenoid
TRANSLATED BY SEAN COTTER
DEEP VELLUM PUBLISHING
DALLAS, TEXAS
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org • @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization
founded in 2013 with the mission to bring
the world into conversation through literature.
Translation copyright © 2022 by Sean Cotter
Originally published as Solenoid by Editura Humanitas in Bucharest, Romania, in 2015.
Copyright © 2015 by Mircea Cărtărescu / Paul Zsolnay Verlag Wien
First US Edition, 2022
“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” By Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright ©1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and David Higham Associates.
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” copyright © 1998 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright © 1998 by Penguin Random House LLC; from COLLECTED FICTIONS: VOLUME 3 by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC; Penguin UK; and the Wylie Agency on behalf of the Estate of Jorge Luis Borges. All rights reserved.
Support for this publication has been provided in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Romanian Cultural Institute’s Translation and Publication Support program.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Cărtărescu, Mircea, author. | Cotter, Sean, 1971– translator.
Title: Solenoid / Mircea Cărtărescu ; translated by Sean Cotter.
Other titles: Solenoid. English
Description: First US edition. | Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022004772 | ISBN 9781646052028 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781646052035 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PC840.13.A86 S6713 2022 | DDC 859/.334--dc23/eng/20220204
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004772
ISBN (TPB) 978-1-64605-202-8 | ISBN (Ebook) 978-1-64605-203-5
Cover design by Anna Jordan
Interior layout and typesetting by KGT
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A man of blood takes clay from the peak
And creates his own ghost
From dreams, scents, and shadows
And brings it living down to us.
But his sacrifice is pointless,
However charming the book’s speech.
Beloved book and useless,
You will answer no question.
Tudor Arghezi, “Ex Libris”
A fragment of his eye socket was removed. The sun and everyone could see inside. It angered him and distracted him from his work; he was furious that he in particular could not see this marvel.
Franz Kafka, Diaries
PART ONE
1
I HAVE LICE, AGAIN. IT DOESN’T SURPRISE ME anymore, doesn’t disgust me. It just itches. I find nits constantly, I pull them off in the bathroom when I comb my hair: little ivory eggs, glistening darkly against the porcelain around the faucet. The comb collects bunches of them, I scrub it with the worn-out bristles of an old toothbrush. I can’t avoid lice—I teach at a school on the edge of town. Half the kids there have lice, the nurse finds the bugs at the start of the year, during her checkup, when she goes through the kids’ hair with the expert motions of a chimpanzee—except she doesn’t crush the lice between her teeth, stained with the chitin of previously captured insects. Instead, she recommends the parents apply a cloudy liquid that smells like lye, the same one the teachers use. Within a few days, the entire school stinks of anti-lice solution.
It’s not that bad, at least we don’t have bedbugs, I haven’t seen those in a while. I remember them, I saw them with my own eyes when I was about three, in the little house on Floreasca where we lived around 1959–60. My father would hoist up the mattress to show them to me. T
hey were tiny black seeds, hard, and as shiny as blackberries, or those ivy berries I knew I shouldn’t put in my mouth. When the seeds between the mattress and the bedframe scattered into the dark corners, they looked so panicked that it made me laugh. I could hardly wait for my dad to lift the heavy mattress up (as he did when he changed the sheets), so I could see the chubby little bugs. I would laugh with such delight that my mother, who kept my curly hair long, would scoop me up and spit on me, so I wouldn’t catch the evil eye. Dad would get out the pump and give them a foul-smelling lindane bath, slaughtering them where they hid in the wooden joints. I liked the smell of the wood bed, the pine that still reeked of sap, I even liked the smell of lindane. Then my father would drop the mattress back in place, and my mother would bring the sheets. When she spread them over the bed, they puffed up like a huge donut, and I loved to throw myself on top. Then I would wait for the sheet to slowly settle over me, to mold itself around my little body, but not all of the sheet, it also fell in a complicated series of folds and pleats. The rooms in that house seemed as big as market halls to me, with two enormous people wandering around, who for some reason took care of me: my mother and father.
But I don’t remember the bites. My mother said they made little red circles on your skin, with a white dot in the middle. And that they burned more than itched. That may be, all I know is that I get lice from the kids when I lean over their notebooks; it’s an occupational hazard. I have worn my hair long ever since my attempt to become a writer. That’s all that’s left of that career, just the hair. And the turtlenecks, like those worn by the first writer I ever saw, the one who is still my glorious and unattainable image of a Writer: the one from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My hair always hangs down onto the girls’ downy, lice-filled hair. Along these semitransparent cables of horn, the insects climb. Their claws have the same curvature as the strands of hair, and they attach to it perfectly. Then they crawl onto the scalp, dropping excrement and eggs. They bite the skin that has never seen the sun, immaculate and parchment-white: this is their food. When the itching becomes unbearable, I turn on the hot water and prepare to exterminate them.
I like how the water resounds in the bathtub, that chaotic churning, that spiral of billions of twisting jets and streams, the roaring vertical fountain inside the green gelatin of infinitesimally rising water conquering the sides of the tub with checked swells and sudden invasions, as though countless transparent ants were swarming in the Amazon jungle. I turn off the faucet and there is quiet, the ants melt into each other, and the soft, jelly sapphire lies silent, it looks at me like a limpid eye and waits. Naked, I slide into the water. I put my head under right away, feeling the walls of water rise symmetrically over my cheeks and forehead. The water grasps me, it presses its weight all around me, it makes me float in its midst. I am the seeds of a fruit with green-blue flesh. My hair spreads toward the sides of the bathtub, like a blackbird opening its wings. The strands repel each other, each one is independent, each one suddenly wet, floating among the others without touching, like the tentacles of a sea lily. I pull my head from one side to the other so I can feel them resist; they spread through the dense water, they become heavy, strangely heavy. It is hard to pull them from their water alveoli. The lice cling to the thick trunks, they become one with them. Their inhuman faces show a kind of bewilderment. Their carcasses are made of the same substance as the hair. They become wet in the hot water, but they do not dissolve. Their symmetrical respiratory tubes, along the edges of their undulating abdomens, are completely shut, like the closed nostrils of sea lions. I float in the bathtub passively, distended like an anatomical specimen, the skin on my fingertips bulges and wrinkles. I am soft, as though covered in transparent chitin. My hands, left to their own will, float on the surface. My sex rises vaguely, like a piece of cork. It seems strange that I have a body, that I am in a body.
I sit up and begin to soap my hair and skin. While my ears were underwater, I could clearly hear the conversations and thumps in the neighboring apartments, but as though in a dream. My ears still feel plugged with gelatin. I pass my soapy hands over myself. My body is not, for me, erotic. My fingers, it seems, move across not my body but my mind. My mind dressed in flesh, my flesh dressed in the cosmos.
As with the lice, I am not that surprised when my soapy fingers come to my navel. This has been happening for a few years. Of course I was scared when it started, because I had heard that sometimes your navel could burst. But I had never worried about mine, my navel was just a dent where my stomach “stuck to my spine,” as my mother would say. At the bottom of this hollow there was something unpleasant to the touch, but that never worried me. My navel was no more than the indentation on top of an apple, where the stem comes out. We all grew like fruits from a petiole crossed with veins and arteries. But starting a few months ago, whenever I poked my finger in to clean this accident of my body, I felt something unusual, something that shouldn’t have been there: a kind of protuberance scraping against my fingertip, something inorganic, not part of my body. It lay within the pale knot of flesh, like an eye between two lids. Now I looked more closely, under the water, pulling the edges of the crevasse apart with my fingers. I couldn’t see well enough, so I got out of the tub, and the lens of water flowed slowly out of my navel. Good lord, I smiled at myself, here I am, contemplating my navel … Yes, there was the pale knot, sticking out a little more than usual, because as you approach thirty the stomach muscles start to sag. A scab the size of a child’s fingernail, in one of the knot’s volutes, turned out to be some dirt. But on the other side, a stiff and painful black-green stump stuck out, the thing my fingertip had felt. I couldn’t imagine what it could be. I tried to catch it with my fingernail, but when I did, I felt a twinge that frightened me: it might be a wart that I should leave alone. I tried to forget about it, to leave it where it had grown. Over the course of our lives, we excrete plenty of moles, warts, dead bones, and other refuse, things we carry around patiently, not to mention how our hair, nails, and teeth fall out: pieces of ourselves stop belonging to us and take on another life, all their own. I have, thanks to my mother, an empty Tic-Tac box with all my baby teeth, and also thanks to her I have my braids from when I was three. Photographs on cracked enamel, with little serrations along the edges like a postage stamp, are similar testimonies: our body really was once in between the sun and the camera lens, and it left a shadow on the film no different than the one the moon, during an eclipse, leaves across the solar disk.
But one week later, again in the bath, my navel felt unusual and irritated again: the unidentified piece had grown a little longer, and it felt different, more disturbing than painful. When we have a toothache, we rub our tongue against our molars, even at the risk of hitting a livid pain. Anything unusual on the sensitive map of our bodies makes us unsettled, nervous: we’ll do anything to escape a constant discomfort. Sometimes, at night, as I’m going to bed, I take off my socks and touch the thickening, hornlike, transparent-yellow flesh on the side of my big toe. I pinch at the growth, I pull it, and after about a half hour I have the edge up, and I keep pulling, with the smarting tips of my fingers, as I become more irritated and more worried, until I remove a thick, shiny layer, with fingerprint-like striations, a whole centimeter of dead skin, now hanging disgracefully from my finger. I can’t pull off any more, since I have already reached the living flesh underneath, the part where I feel pain, but still I have to put a stop to the irritation, the unease. I take a pair of scissors and cut it in half, then I examine it for a long time: a white shell that I made, without knowing how, just as I don’t remember how I made my own bones. I fold it between my fingers, I feel it, it smells vaguely like ammonia: the piece is organic, yet dead, dead even while it was a part of me, adding a few grams to my weight; it still makes me uneasy. I don’t feel like throwing it out, I turn out the light and go to bed, still holding it between my fingers, only to forget everything the next day. Still, for a little while after that I limp slightly: the place I pu
lled it from hurts.
I tugged on the hard sliver coming out of my navel, until, unexpectedly, it was in my hand. A small cylinder, a half centimeter long and about as wide as a matchstick. It looked to have gotten darker over time, worn and sticky and tarnished with age. It was something ancient, mummified, saponified, who the hell knows. I put it under the faucet and washed away the layer of grime; I could see the thing had been a yellowish-green color, long ago, perhaps. I put it in an empty matchbox. It resembled, more than anything, the stub of a burnt match.
A few weeks later, my navel, again softened in hot water, yielded another fragment, twice as long this time, of the same hard substance. I realized that it was the flexible end of a piece of twine, I could even see its multitude of twisted fibers. It was string, ordinary string, the kind used for packages. The string with which, twenty-seven years earlier, they had tied my navel in the decrepit workers’ maternity ward where I was born. Now my navel was aborting, slowly, a piece every two weeks, every month, then another after three more months. Today I’m removing the fifth piece, carefully, with a certain pleasure. I flatten it out, scrape it clean with my fingernail, wash it in the bathtub water. It is the longest piece so far, and I hope the last. I put it in the matchbox, alongside the others: they lie there politely, yellowish-greenish-black, their ends raveling. Hemp, the same material as homemade shopping bags, the kind that cut into your hands when filled with potatoes, the same material you use to tie packages. On Holy Mary’s Day, my father’s family in Banat would send me packages: poppy-seed and apple pastries. The brown-green string was my favorite part: I would tie the doorknobs together, so my mother wouldn’t have another child. On each knob, I tied tens, hundreds of knots.