The Mind-Bending Fiction of Mircea Cărtărescu

The Romanian novelist Mircea Cărtărescu is superficially among these writers’ numbers. His novel Solenoid has a relentless preoccupation with subjectivity. But unlike his peers’ self-obsession, Cărtărescu’s is not concomitant with the mere piling up of perceptual factoids. If anything, he aims to do the opposite: While introducing us to a protagonist who is not unlike himself, Cărtărescu has written a novel about a self that is decidedly not synonymous with its author. For a start, his nameless antihero lacks a straightforwardly diachronic nature: For all that he persists in time as a unitary thinking “I,” he is also split in two not just once but thrice. Having had a twin brother who died in infancy, Cărtărescu’s alter ego then spends his own early life in the guise of a female, since until he was 4, his mother dressed him in girls’ clothes, “Mitosis” becomes one of the repeated terms that act as tocsins for Cărtărescu’s readers, awaking us to the fissiparous nature of everything, from dividing cells to our own divisive fates.