Mircea Cartarescu

An "anti-Kunstlerroman" so performatively telegraphing every one of its' sentiments that it comes across ironic, an irony the book also tries to trick you into finding plausible by way of a faux-Hegelian omnipresence—a desperate cry of the sophomoric "this is book and anti-book"—that it ultimately leaves anyone already familiar with the concepts therein metaphysically deflated. The main motif is a gnostic one, thinly veiled as veils can thin themselves: "Picketists" who protest the flesh as prison, yet limpidly, as protestors of social issues would: cosmopolitanizing the true gnostic sentiment, these generic repetitions of lamentation and the problem of evil (stated not as the Nag Hammadi would, where the question is squarely placed on the Split within creation itself) and a cringe-inducingly overstated desire of the author begging you to see his book as the "hypercubic book whose covers gather the hundreds of cubes of its pages", a hyperbolic book that devours all other books by no other merit than it tells you to do so, an idea so empty that it doesn't realize it embodies the exact naivete of the fictional book the author fails to succeed with in story's start—"The Fall"; other motifs include: "the history of Mathematics" a.k.a re-explaining in templated collocations Boole-as-logical-prophet, Hinton's dimensional thought as a spoonfed analogy for anagogy (cart's before the horse here) in the same way Flatland or Sagan or your resident stoner has explained many a time before, and how "Mandelbrotian" his narrator, his book, his mind is, where he just means "fractal"; his writing self-proclaims itself as Kafka's gates, Borges labryinths, Escher's hand drawing itself, inserts a Virgil, namedrops a Klein bottle here, quotes word-for-word "Do Not Go Into That Gentle Night" there . . . convolution apparent at this point must be furthered that this is at no fault of the translator, since these faux pas can somehow be met with a pretty phrasing yet surrounded by platitude at the diegetic and conceptual level, these referents weave a flimsy quilt, none delved at depth or plunged for weight or held with suave or dropped in play and it's made clear this is out of lack of capacity and ability, not artistic choice. A tragic sign of literatures' denouement: the book who wants to escape the prison of its own 2-dimensionality, tricks the literary types fluffed but not nourished on philosophy proper into thinking the book truly a tesseract (have not Joyce, McLuhan, Deleuze, Derrida already written the tesseract non-book, almost exclusively?); the book does not perform what it describes, it simply choreographs for you in clear terms what it wants to do narratively but can't out of its own lack, a convincing facsimile in passing but executed in the conceptual block equivalents of poorly rendered CGI.… (altro)

Solenoide
Mircea Cărtărescu
Publicado: 2015 | 767 páginas
Novela Otros

«Tras leer Solenoide, en cierto modo tu vida se corta en dos, dejas de ser un lector común, como al leer a Homero, Kant o Heidegger». (Gabriel Liiceanu).

Considerada por la crítica la obra más madura de Mircea Cărtărescu hasta el momento, Solenoide es una novela monumental, deslumbrante, en la que resuenan ecos de Pynchon, Rilke, Borges y Kafka. Estamos ante el diario de un escritor frustrado, que desgrana su infancia y su adolescencia en los arrabales de una ciudad comunista, devastada, gris y fría: una Bucarest alucinada, dotada de una melancolía abrumadora.

Profesor de Rumano en un instituto de barrio, con una carrera literaria fracasada y una profesión que no le interesa, compra una casa antigua con forma de barco, construida por el inventor de un solenoide, que en sus tripas alberga una extraña maquinaria: un sillón de dentista dotado de un tablero de mandos. Pronto intima con una profesora que ha sido captada por una secta mística, la de los piquetistas, que organizan manifestaciones nocturnas por los cementerios de la ciudad. Mientras tanto, el narrador se enfrenta a alucinaciones que le revelan la amarga verdad de su existencia.

Solenoide es la piedra de toque en torno a la que gravitan el resto de ficciones de Cărtărescu. Una novela que atrae todas las pistas, temas y obsesiones literarias de un autor genial que se ha ido convirtiendo, poco a poco, en un escritor de culto.… (altro)