“Solenoid” by Mircea Cartarescu (translated by Sean Cotter)

This sprawling philosophical novel takes a little time to get going, but the action gets compulsive as the plot gets odder and odder. The narrator spends a lot of time contemplating death, “Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade. And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes…. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been.” Around a hundred and fifty pages later, the narrator is still mulling over his own death. The nature of consciousness and of humanity’s existence are other recurring themes in the book, “It is beyond the limits of evil that a creature should understand its own fate. It is crude, barbarous, and pointless to bring a spirit into the world after an infinite ight, just to cast it out again, after a nanosecond of chaotic life, back into another, endless night. It is sadistic to give it, ahead of time, full knowledge of the fate that awaits it.”

The essence of living, humanity’s purpose on earth, and the reason for each single life are all conundrums the narrator fears he will fail to ever solve, “I was enveloped in a fear that I had never felt before, even in my most terrifying dreams; not of death, not of suffering, not of terrible diseases, not of the sun going dark, but fear at the thought that I will never understand, that my life was not long enough and my mind not good enough to understand. That I had been given many signs and I didn’t know how to read them. That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hand, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it will flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.”