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Mircea Cartarescu: Solenoid (Paperback, 2015, Editura Humanitas) 4 stars

I like Solenoid and am not done thinking through it.

5 stars

I love the mix of personal angst and fear with the surreal, with the unimaginable and incoherent; the use of flatness and floating, of painting and tattooing, of inoculation and machinery to illustrate his struggles with mortality and failure. It was sometimes quite moving and real, other times dazzling and bizarre.

I feel like the biggest issue I had was with its dense, repetitive prose. If I could’ve read it more frequently or in longer sessions, perhaps I would’ve felt more in the surreal semi-conscious flow of it. Instead I struggled to fit it into my life, and often had to go back and re-read just to build enough, uh, semantic momentum to complete a chapter or two.