This profoundly surreal book presents an inner life like no other. Solenoid is the bewildering, unclassifiable, barely comprehensible record of a dreamer and a visionary, genius and nutcase, loner and loser, philosopher and pariah - all rolled into one. . . Mircea Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult - TLS

An engrossing study of a cerebral antihero, who longs to escape his earthly existence. . . an instant classic - New York Times

A bravura performance: extravagantly brilliant ideas pinwheeling out from the dark center of a scrupulously imagined and death-driven self - The Nation

A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written - Kirkus (starred review)

The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cartarescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical - Wall Street Journal

Instead of delivering a sharp, succinct punch, Solenoid goes the way of the oceanic-rejecting brevity because the author, a Romanian Daedalus, is laying the foundation for a narrative labyrinth. . . The writing itself is hypnotic and gorgeously captures the oneiric quality of Cartarescu's Bucharest. . . The sheer immensity of Cotter's undertaking combined with the unfailing evenness of the translation's quality is nothing short of remarkable - Los Angeles Review of Books

[An] unsummarisable monster of a book - Irish Times

A masterpiece. . . Solenoid synthesizes and subtly mocks elements of autofiction and history fiction by way of science fiction. The result is unlik