I can assure you it will convince you to go out and order this book immediately if you haven’t done so already. If you haven’t read the review already, stop what you’re doing and redirect your attention to his piece. And that was before a translation was available in English, which adds to the impressiveness of the undertaking. In his review, Andrei deconstructs, dissects, and reveals (with incredible erudition, I might add) the seething, beating heart of this novel. ĭespite the fact that deployments of the terms “surreal” and “fourth dimension” are sufficient enough to gain my interest, any evocation of the name Pynchon will have me immediately running to pick up whatever book to which this author is being compared. In November of 2017, Andrei wrote an absolutely stunning review of Solenoid on the blog, in which he called it “the greatest surrealist novel ever written”, and “one of the four great novels of the 21st Century to explore the fourth dimension”, rivaled only by Miquel de Palol’s El Troiacord, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, and Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. For my money, he is the strongest reader in the digital literary community, and I cannot recommend his blog highly enough.

He provides a rare window through the language barrier as he covers novels written in French, Spanish, Russian, German, etc. As the name should imply, Andrei’s blog, “The Untranslated” is devoted to novels that have yet to receive an English adaptation, and remain unread by us anglophone monoglots (myself regretfully included).

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu