People like me are mostly full of shit, so take the following with a grain of salt. Written as the diary of a failed poet turned disillusioned teacher in the eighties in Bucharest, Solenoid synthesizes and subtly mocks elements of autofiction and history fiction more on this later by way of science fiction.
The result is unlike any genre in ambition or effect, something else altogether, a self-sufficient style that proudly rejects its less emancipated alternatives. Solenoid in turn moves past adolescence into adulthood, the horrors of routine, love, and non-exceptionality. The question at the center of this novel could perhaps be formulated thus: what madness lies hidden in the unremarkable? I can only offer a roughshod plot summary. The novel begins with a brilliant bit of ironic foreshadowing: our first-person narrator, literally navel-gazing, discovers what appear to be an infinite number of small pieces of twine, like sections of narrative, protruding from his belly button.
In college, following a childhood and adolescence spent reading loaned books in the half-light, he writes a long, epic poem titled The Fall , meant as a magnum opus. His reception at the main literary gathering in Bucharest is nothing short of atrocious and he vows to never write again. A sense of half-reality lingers upon these pages. Not mundane, by definition, but almost. Fiction infinitely redoubles our world.
Letters, stories, memories, diaries, treatises β nothing is safe, everything shall be made useful and new. Some contemporary authors, like W.
Sebald, V. Critics, in turn, became enforcers. Autofiction, meanwhile, bores even as it enchants, and often incites befuddlement when it makes writers inseparable from narrators. Any committed reader of fiction will know that for history one should read historians, and that if writers want to give themselves familial headaches or divorces for what they write, they should feel free. A dialectical step forward, or at least a bloody good read, Solenoid combines Knausgaard-esque ambition, Borgesian sophistication, and Nabokovian delirium to puncture whatever critical paradigms one attempts to impose.
