Solenoid - Mircea Cărtărescu Audiobook

Written by Mircea Cărtărescu
Read by Paul Boehmer
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2025

WINNER of the Dublin Literary Award 2024 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2022

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, Words Without Borders

A highly acclaimed master work of fiction from Cartarescu, author of Blinding

Based on Cartarescu’s own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist’s life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

Length: 34 hrs and 4 mins
Release date: 02-14-23