An extract from Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter
Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist’s life, and then spirals into a bizarre, existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics
An interview with Mircea Cărtărescu and Sean Cotter, author and translator of Solenoid
With Solenoid longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, we spoke to its author and translator about how the book ‘wrote itself’, and the authors that have inspired them
Mircea Cărtărescu
The inspirations behind Solenoid
My book is, essentially, about human solidarity in the face of suffering and death. We have seen too many atrocities and too much genocide on this planet where we all live together. My characters protest against the tragedy of the spirit that must die. “Solenoid” can be seen as a long commentary on Dylan Thomas’s famous line “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Solenoid is also my human and literary testament: everything I have ever wanted to say to my fellow human beings.
How I wrote Solenoid
All my books are handwritten and without any proofreading. I wrote Solenoid in four large notebooks, over the course of five years. I had no prior plan, the book wrote itself, like a child developing in its mother’s womb without her knowing how. I am just a portal through which my writings come into the world. That is why I am never proud of a novel of mine, but only infinitely grateful. Solenoid is a vital organ of my work, along with the novels Orbitor and Theodoros, as well as the short story volumes Nostalgia and Melancolia. It is not only an aesthetic writing, but also an ethical one, because it shows my love for people, for truth and social justice.
The book that made me fall in love with reading
There are hundreds of books that have shaped me as a person and as an artist. As a child I was enchanted by Huckleberry Finn. As a teenager my role model was the musician Adrian Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. V by Thomas Pynchon was the book that impressed me the most when I started writing literature. In fact, I could say about myself what Franz Kafka said about himself: ‘After all, I am nothing but literature’.
Mircea Cărtărescu
© Catalina FlaminzeanuThe book that made me want to become a writer
I never wanted to be a writer. In fact, I never wanted to be anything. Writing for me is like breathing: I’m not aware of it, but without it I suffocate. I never wanted to write, just as I never wanted to live or speak. It just happened that way: I wrote, with all my might, every sentence and every paragraph, every novel and every poem. I didn’t write books to publish them, but to live in them. However, when I was 14, I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote and had a kind of reverie about what it means to be a writer: a man alone living in a studio apartment with only his typewriter.
The book that changed the way I think about the world
I have a great love for Virginia Woolf’s books. The Waves was the freshest, most innovative, and most poetic book I read as a teenager. The fantastic panorama of the frozen Thames in Orlando still haunts me today as proof that absolute beauty can be captured in a few pages of literature. I learned from her, as from many other writers I love, that true prose is always poetry.
A book originally written in Romanian that I would recommend to English-language readers
Mateiu Caragiale’s novel, Rakes of the Old Court, also translated into English by Sean Cotter, is a cult book for Romanian readers, a gnostic writing, of incredible linguistic expressiveness, almost untranslatable. At the centre of the novel is a decadent Bucharest, where vice and melancholy mark the destinies of the characters. In the last decade, this unforgettable novel has been translated into all major languages.
The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read
Of the past winners of the International Booker Prize, Olga Tokarczuk, with her novel Flights, is the closest to my taste. But the list of winners of this prize is fabulous. After all, the greatness of a literary prize is given by the list of its winners over the years.
Rakes of the Old Court by Mateiu Caragiale
All my books are handwritten and without any proofreading
Sean Cotter
The inspirations behind my translation of Solenoid, and how I did it
The translation connects with one of the book’s central themes: escape. I began the translation during the pandemic, when all any of us wanted was escape, and when I had no brain for anything beside the slow, detailed work of the translation’s first draft. Mircea’s words were a staircase out of the panic and stress of that time, an intense encounter with literary beauty.
I translated Solenoid over the course of about two years, and four drafts. The vast scope of the novel’s references to European literature and American mathematics and the Rubik’s Cube and the Colentina neighborhood in Bucharest meant that I read widely alongside the translation. I eventually decided that the most useful part of the research was not understanding the references but simply the posture of curiosity, the same wondering that drives the book’s narrator.
The book that made me fall in love with reading
My parents were, for a brief time, Stormy Petrels, that is, members of a Sherlock Holmes discussion group that held an annual costume ball. If stories could make my mother and father dress weirdly, they must be powerful. When I read The Sign of Four, I was proud of finishing a grown-up book, and I expected adulthood to be weird. It has turned out to be the right attitude.
Sean Cotter
© Kevin BrownThe book that made me want to become a translator
I was introduced to translation via an exercise in my first-year literature class, an English-to-English translation of Robert Browning’s poem, ‘Meeting at Night’. The exercise was my first taste of recording, in literary form, my experience of that poem. Matching literature to literature seemed more profound, an encounter on the poem’s own terrain. Now, I think about translation in a similar way: the literary record of my attempt to reconcile my own biography across different places and languages.
The book that changed the way I think about the world
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy makes me both laugh and sigh, and it shows that a novel can do whatever it wants.
A book originally written in Romanian that I’d recommend to English-language readers
Mircea Horia Simionescu’s Dictionar onomastic (Onomastic Dictionary) is an astoundingly playful collection of names, that lead to puns, that lead to stories, riffs, and beautiful explosions. One of the few books that can match Sterne, one of the best playgrounds for curiosity I know.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
The most useful part of the research was not understanding the references but simply the posture of curiosity, the same wondering that drives the book’s narrator
