Solenoid and Crime & Punishment

Some recent reads

Where have I been? What have I been doing? Resting. 2023 has been a bit of a daze so far, it’s passing me by at a distorted anomalous speed. I was looking through my Substack archives and comparing the dates to the calendar and I realized that my last newsletter was over a month ago, yet I feel like I wrote it yesterday.

I’ve been suffering from a lack of interest in the digital world. My old laptop started to fall apart and I ordered a new one yet I let it sit unused for almost a week. This is the first time I’m typing on it and the first time I will publish using it. I’m under a severe case of digital ennui.

Most of all, I’m trying to use my free time to focus on writing fiction. Last year was a bad time for writing, between traveling through the South Pacific and across the United States, buying a house, and a new car, and starting a new position at work, my ability to sit down and write was severely impaired. I had very little inspiration.

What I did manage to accomplish this past month is reading. I got through the first two novels on my reading plan and both of them blew me away. The first novel was the wildcard on my list, Solenoid by Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu. I chose it due to my severe lack of knowledge and experience with fiction written in the country I was born in. Solenoid was released in Romania in 2015 but became available in English translation in late 2022.

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Solenoid is a masterpiece of surreal fiction, quite possibly the best novel of the 21st century so far. A complex, byzantine, maximalist novel, a combination of Borges, Kafka, and Pynchon, a literary piece evoking the art of H.R. Geiger and Escher, set in the decaying and oppressive Bucharest of the 1970s.

I’ve said it elsewhere that I believe if your novel can be easily adapted into a film it’s probably not a great work. The visual narrative medium of film and long-form television is the medium of the present, with long-form television shows like True Detective and The White Lotus being outstanding examples of excellent narrative and visually artistic accomplishment. Therefore I think that if you are writing narrative fiction you must lean into the strengths of the medium, accomplishing narrative, stylistic forms that cannot easily translate into more palatable forms. In the same way, William Friedkin believes that the car chase is the purest form of cinema, impossible to do well in any other medium, the author of fiction has to chisel out the stylistic intrinsic strengths found in the novel form.

In the above manner, Solenoid is a tremendous success. The novel is nominally a manuscript of a failed writer, the author's alter ego, a sort of alternate universe Mircea Cartarescu who failed to succeed as a writer, instead settling into a miserable mediocre life as a teacher at an impoverished school on the edge of Bucharest. Yet, there is so much more. Dreams, hallucinations, sleep paralysis, strange night visitations, bizarre insect cults, oneomancers, and body horror.

Our unnamed narrator lives in a strange boat-shaped house, a house that sits on a strange device The Borina Solenoid, a techno-mystical machine that is placed on one of the many spiritual energy lay-lines that cross the city of Bucharest. His journals fluctuate between the banal mundane world of 70s Romania under Communism to the surreal world where the Solenoids cause narrative disruption and our narrator encounters giant monstrosities in an abandoned subterranean factory, cults that protest death, strange creatures reminiscent of Salvador Dali, narratives about Mina Minovich founder of the Romanian forensic institute and a strange early 20th-century psychologist named Nicolae Vaschide who is obsessed with experiencing the perfect dream. All of this and more lead to the novel's end which is a beautiful piece of artistic transcendence and sacrifice.

Solenoid is massively maximalist and almost impossible to describe, except that I can easily say it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read and a prime example of why the written novel still has value in the 21st century.

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After completing Solenoid I continued my prescribed plan by returning to Russia and my favorite author, Dostoevsky, and read the first of his four masterpieces, Crime & Punishment. I read the novel sometime in high school but remembered very little of it beyond the basic plot and premise, so I wanted to return to it in the same way I returned to The Brothers Karamazov a few years ago. I wasn’t disappointed.

There isn’t much for me to write that hasn’t been written about this masterpiece, which is easily in the top five of the world's greatest novels. An exploration of murder, egoism, and utilitarian nihilistic philosophy gone wrong.

One of the things that strike me whenever I read Dostoevsky is how current and pertinent to our present his novels are. Raskolnikov could easily commit the same murder with the same philosophical justifications today and he would find even more moral support and understanding from certain elements in our contemporary society. While Dostoevsky succeeded in showing us the evil that springs from undeveloped nihilistic materialism we have sadly been unable to rid ourselves of these poisonous philosophies even a century later. We live in a world of unrepentant Raskolnikovs and Verkovenskys.