In “he Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Louis Borges’s postulates a novel so complex it would become “a labyrinth in which all men would become lost.” Left unfinished by its fictional author, the novel is a legacy emblematic of the innumerable possibilities of existence. For Borges, multitude makes the case for universal elusiveness—a sublimity in extremis.

With celebrated Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu’s massive novel Solenoid, we are deep into Borges territory. Solenoid (Deep Vellum Press, 672 pages) is a chronicle told by an unnamed high school teacher whose Kafkaesque days are spent at public School 86 in Bucharest, “the saddest city in the world.” At night, the unnamed protagonist surrenders himself to the phantasmagoric spell of a “solenoid” buried beneath his house; the solenoid is a strange electromagnetic coil with dimension-bending properties. The solenoid causes the narrator to float above his bed. We learn how the mysterious contraption is built from concepts of Nicholas Tesla and the notion of the hypercube. Later, the solenoid is revealed to be one among an array of solenoids buried throughout the city. Ultimately, the narrator meets a woman with whom he falls deeply in love. In a finale that owes as much to science fiction as James Joyce, the couple, and the entire city of Bucharest, are launched spaceship-like from the surface of the earth, trailing a cone of infrastructure and debris.

“Plot” is a misleading word; it is fruitless to capture Cartarescu’s surrealism in a few pages. Solenoid is a colossal pastiche of episodes leaping from the mundane to the frontiers of cosmic speculation. Peppered throughout are ruminations on philosophical conundrums, spirituality, and aesthetics. All of this is acutely displayed in the hero’s reverence for the concept of the tesseract. For those who haven’t seen the movie Interstellar, a tesseract is a mathematical way to visualize more dimension than the three we live in. Imagine a cube in which each of the existing ninety-degree corners has another “unseen” dimension, ninety-degrees to the other lines. As the narrator says,

The world of four dimensions is, to our three-dimensional world, what ours is to the world of two dimensions and, as follows, what the bidimensional world is to the world of one dimension. Here is Hinton’s lever, his mental mechanism with which, making much more efforts than we can imagine, we can intuit a space otherwise forbidden to our thought.

So, dimensions are multiplied, not unlike possibilities in Borges’ imaginary novel.

The tesseract is a lovey mind-bender, a mandala, a portal to a higher world, an escape from Plato’s cave. At the end of an elegant ten-page reverie on the weird polyhedron, the narrator wonders,

Could the same infinite regression be taking place inside my mind (the inconclusive Morpheic epilepsy of the left parietal lobe?) when, at night, a soft whistling in my ears amplifies like a siren, increases in magnitude, becomes a deafening scream that quickly generates an intense yellow color, and the sound-color invaded my skull with its golden screams and shatters it into fragments in an infinite terror, in ever more amplified wreaths of ecstasy and despair, into insanity and beyond insanity…

Perhaps in its fascination with the tesseract, the book reveals a peculiarly Romanian fixation on the sacred. The tesseract combines modern rationalism with medieval mysticism.

Little wonder, the fixation on escape. Modern Romanian literature has been haunted by the shadow of authoritarianism. The nineteenth-century poet Mihai Eminescu is celebrated as the voice of nationalist reclamation, the virtues of rural life and peasant religious conviction. He rode the fad for folklore sweeping European Romanticism. Our narrator finds uneasy solace in Emanescu’s words, “An unseen hand pulled him into the past.” To which the narrator observes, “Nothing defines us better than the sweet torture of nostalgia.”

There is a dark side to the yearning. The famous Romanian literary figures, Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, and E.M Cioran, were involved with the now notorious Criterion group, who wanted to modernize Romanian literature. Many members joined the Iron Cross, a Romanian fascist group. Eliade became its ambassador; Cioran wrote op-eds extolling Naziism. Ionescu was the only one to reject the movement that later inspired his absurdist play, Rhinoceros.

Romania is an excellent study for the present American age, when a significant slice of the population has shown itself willing to throw its lot in with autocracy. Democracy can be tiresome. Democracy requires attention. Thus, democracy has an inherent weakness, as Socrates noted: susceptibility to a mob. In grotesque and often gorgeous prose (rendered in English with breathtaking skill by translator Sean Cotter), Solenoid offers a defense of freedom. Freedom is smuggled in art. Freedom is not just about tolerance; it is about embracing the weird, the fine, the unique.

There is a temptation to read Solenoid as a purely political work. That would restrict its richness. For Cartarescu, Romania represents the human struggle writ small; Romanian culture mixes edgy modernism with nostalgia. The trait grows out of a desire to recover something lost or denied, perhaps always separate: the holy. A core of romanticism motivates the anarchic quest of Solenoid.

Yet, if there is a narrative element that binds the multidimensionality, it is simple domestic bliss. The woman and the teacher have a child, spinning a conjugal tableau. Nostalgic as this conclusion may seem, it is vitally important that when Cartarescu speaks of love, he does so without deprecation or irony. The simplicity of love drives the mystical heart of the novel. Solenoid is a baroque monstrosity; it is mordantly funny and shot through with startling lyrical passages. Whether one becomes lost in this garden of forking paths is perhaps a matter of aesthetic compass.

-Vic Petersen, author of The Berserkers, 2023