The Obliterative Logic of the Unreal

On Mircea Cărtărescu's surreal, transcendent, and nasty novel Solenoid

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Autofiction: the French invented it, Americans made it boring, and now the European continent has rescued it. Between Jon Fosse’s total destruction of character in Septology – the I of the autofictional project becoming Another, the universal ‘other’ of traditional fiction – and Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid, which brings the navel-gazing nature of all autofictional plots to its extreme end. The narrator of Solenoid is someone not unlike Cărtărescu, but instead of writing a novel about writing a novel, this narrator is interested in the world beyond the world, and even more is willing to venture into those other worlds . A couple years back I sent out a silly little tweet:

Evan Dent @evancdent

Autofiction would be fun if it was about some prick Brooklyn writer having to fight a dragon or something but they’re always about a prick Brooklyn writer trying to write a book

And whether I knew it or not, Cărtărescu had picked up the gauntlet I threw down. Though no dragons appear in Solenoid, everything else under the sun – in this galaxy or the many suns of another – does appear in this book, this seemingly limitless repository of, simultaneously, the nastiest and most transcendent things literature can offer.