Book review: Mircea Cartarescus imagination knows no bounds

How can you deal with a literature that wants to be ”a levitation of the books page, a pneumatic text without any contact with the material world”? After Mircea Cartarescus ”Nostalgia”, after trebandsverket ”Orbitor” and the long versberättelsen ”the Levant” is, before the reading of the ”Solenoid” set to himself trying to lift and just go with the flow in the open airspace of hallucinations, dreams, fantasies.

It turns out to be wise, for the new, 800-page novel to no less than imagine the unimaginable, the fourth dimension that shows ”the world as it really is, indescribable and with millions of sensory organs that open like sea anemones in the ocean's incessant motion.

What I thought was pure science fiction show after a quick search to be proven science, and with Wikipedia and Cartarescus help do I find the Charles Howard Hintons try that with hyperkuber visualize an extra dimension. The novel mentions several others who tried to blow up beyond the material world's limits, among others, Nicolae Minovici, who carried out a large number of controlled hangings of himself, interrupted just before death, but sufficiently durable to provide Minovici visions, which he then signed. Not to mention all the fantasies in literature and art, Salvador Dali's surrealist paintings, Franz Kafka's transformations, and many, many more.

It is easy to lose yourself in the novel's labyrinthine excesses, all the more important then to point out that the ”Solenoid” has a fixed structure under the kaleidoscopic surface. The narrator is an anonymous primary school teachers who, in their youth abruptly interrupted a budding writing career when he read his poem ”the Case” and made a fiasco. The ”case” is also the title of the poem that once was Mircea Cartarescus breakthrough. Had our anonymous narrator met with the same cheers that the young author had his life been completely different, but the reality is now a time so undersamt arranged that each blade of grass the man treading on the may be a crossroads where life changes direction.

not completely given up writing, he will keep a diary of their monotonous days in school, over their nightly dreams, and their memories. This bulging manuscript is novel, and it moves freely between the three worlds: the memories of all the childhood illnesses in the home of Stefan çel Mare – a central address also in Cartarescus earlier novels – are interspersed with the night's hallucinatory drömfärder and meetings in the teachers ' lounge, where the risk to be monitored by the secret police Securitate empties each call on the content.

the House the narrator lives in is built on top of a solenoid, a giant solenoid that makes it possible for him and his sängkamrat Irina to levitate even in the waking state which makes their amorous encounters something out of the ordinary, even enviable.

However, the physical association here is certainly not the only possible way to an expanded awareness. The narrator is trying to find the exits, but encounter everywhere on the smooth walls, the own brain restrictions, but the mighty barrier between him and a higher dimension is still death. He has lived with ever since he lost his twin brother so early that he did not remember him and he has since childhood read copious quantities of such literature that follows their hallucinerande heroes to the limit of the vetbara, hamsun's ”Hunger”, Strindberg's ”Alone”, Rilke's ”Malte Laurids Brigge”, all in order to understand death.

the sections depicted the two years the narrator as a small boy spent at the sanatorium, along with other tuberculous children. Stay is a sort of children's version of Thomas Mann's ”magic mountain” and creates a space for reflection on death, while the immediate bodily needs are constantly intrudes: after a certain time get the boys not to leave his bed to go to the toilet.

the Distance between eschatology and skatologi, between the doctrine of the death and the study of excrement, is just an e short of Cartarescu. His world view is as dualist as diverse: humans are good and evil, the butterfly and the spider, a man and a woman, but she is in one and the same body, the dichotomy does not lead to a simple and visible division of the world, but, on the contrary, to the realization that the universe is infinite while we are only able to perceive a fraction of it, and our inherent possibilities.

For those who have access to the fourth dimension, man is just a microscopic mite, while kvalstret for the human eye is something invisible that itch under the skin. In one of his dreams the narrator down to the mites that have built a world in the triangle between the thumb and index finger. Where do they live alone, ignorant of the higher power that loves them, he now takes kvalstergestalt and go, among them a small amount of time. Jesus as the mites! Man may have their limitations but Cartarescus imagination certainly knows no limits.

Inger Johansson: she has translated everything that is on the English of Cartarescu and I do not understand how she does, but her interpretations are miracles that are not transubstantiationen after: she transforms Cartarescus poetic, stylistically diverse Romanian to Swedish, which appears enriched, as if the words will us to the meeting from a fourth dimension.