“Sol” is a joy. If you enjoy fantasy, to metaphorical and allegorical puzzles, you should read Mircea Cărtărescus new book.
Bucharest, “the saddest city on the face of the earth, but equally, the only real city-city” photo: AP
the reading of The novels by the Romanian writer and poet Mircea Cărtărescu is a very private pleasure. Probably no other contemporary author has such an opulent, all scales busting fantasy. And no one has his hometown in the language is always new, surprising way to made such a surreal world. This is especially true for Cărtărescus “Orbitor”trilogy, “The knower”, “The body” and “wings”.
His new novel, “Sol”, continues this trilogy. The nameless I-narrator grew up in the “Orbitor”-novels in a huge tower block on the road Ştefan cel Mare, has seen all night long from the window of his child’s room on the lights of the city and merged with his Dreams to an imaginary world.
this Time, however, other experiences and stages of his life are at the centre of the narrative. For example, the memory of the first betrayal of the mother, says the young narrator of in the Morning, you drive to his Cousin. But instead it goes to an Operation in a dental clinic. A traumatic experience he will never forget.
Even the Phase of study of the readers of the “Orbitor”novels know. Here, the ultimate experience is a Meeting of the “moon-literature circle”, dated 24. October 1977. The poem, the narrator argues, should go like a bomb, instead, it is treated by the critics of the circle as a piece of “literary pathology”.
Mircea Cărtărescu: “Sol”. From the Romanian by Ernest Wichner. Zsolnay/Hanser, Munich, 2019, 912 PP., EUR 36
The narrator is not slaughtered ruthlessly “slaughtered”, as he writes, but “by the way, contemptuously, and with a Smile on his lips”; but now he gives up all his poetic ambitions. And at a school in a suburb of Bucharest, and the Romanian teacher.
You might think, Cărtărescu, who was, according to the study of literature from time to time a teacher would with a “Solenoid” an alternative way of life without all of his success and fame as in real life through play. But the attitude of the narrator, his insignificance, is also a Central part of his poetological concept.
The anonymity of writing for him is crucial. “Because I Betsidney draw not a novel writer am, and no false doors on the walls, I am happy when Writing, this happiness replaced me all the glory.” With doors, the outputs from prison, are here meant, than that the narrator feels about his life.
glory, however, goes on to say, leads to “conformism, falsehood, self-deception, delusions of grandeur and disappointment”. Because they kept themselves and the texts to be null and void, had become truly for great authors, such as Kafka, possible in the first place.
So Cărtărescus anti-writer and narrator writes only for himself. And although long stretches of the novel quite realistic. For example, about the time he spent as a nine-year-old in the 1960s in a lung sanatorium for children. The conditions were as violent as later in the school in which he teaches. There, the parents come to him and ask him to beat your children. “Hit them in the back of the neck, sir, do not let to intimidate, otherwise, you climb on the roof!”
at the same time the world breaks into this Ceaușescu-the Fantastic. As children are disappearing in the big break in a disused factory, which is located opposite the school. The Director instructs the narrator and one of his colleagues, what are you doing on the derelict site.
A magnetic coil to let him and his girlfriend at the push of a button in the bed
In the case of the Expedition in the factory of the giant hall appears on one of the walls, a door, which is secured by a combination lock. float The unconscious of the narrator helps him to find the combination of numbers: Intuitively, you think of him. Behind the door is a hallway then branches quickly in a “maze of halls and Sälchen crammed with exhibits, biological products, were artificially colored, glasses with vile creatures, educational boards on the walls, on which the space biology of some of the nightmare creatures was celebrated.”
There is not always a fear of spaces that characterize the fantastic passages of the novel. Under the old house, the narrator buys an old gentleman, a Solenoid, a magnetic coil, which makes him and his girlfriend at the push of a button the bed will float. A Solenoid that pulls in a larger Form at a different point in the novel, the city of Bucharest from the ground.
Bucharest, “the saddest city on the face of the earth, but equally, the only real city-city”. Because in “contrast to all the bahis other cities … Bucharest is the product of a giant spirit that the was a Time”. A mind that had the brilliant idea to “build from the beginning already ruined the city”.
As a reader, you suspect that all the visions, allegories, and metaphors of the novel suggests something else. Also impressive is the wealth of languages, the Romanian author tells is. This wealth and the substantive claim may not lie in the Trend of the current, for the day and the audience-written prose. But for someone who has the patience, the fun of fantastic visions, to metaphorical and allegorical puzzles for the Solenoid is “” a worthwhile read.
