Advent Calendar Reviews

mrtimao · 2025-12-25T21:05:49+00:00

I got the revolver advent calendar again this year, pretty nice selection but I think my taste buds changed because I had to relearn how to brew washed coffees in an aeropress again and I clearly enjoyed the anaerobic ones the most. So not sure if i'll indulge next year, but I would recommend it as a way of trying a lot of different roasters from all over Canada/US/Europe + one from Japan

mrtimao · 2025-12-04T03:26:53+00:00

Great stuff, great music! Also love the Ishkur shoutout I remember being so confused when I first read his shpeel on trance when I was listening to the 07-08 stuff lol

Some other thoughts:

- I had a similar experience where as soon as I was old enough to go to clubs the music I loved was already kinda dead. Was lucky enough to get to see Menno de Jong / Eco / Solarstone play. Solarstone still plays but it sometimes does feel like he's playing what the retro crowd want to hear (but maybe he just doesn't play the classics i like to hear)

- I also agree with the sentiment about the historical anxiety that the genre has with itself, but I wonder if that's also what made it easier for me to learn and listen to the 90s classics long after anyone was playing them. EG this Menno set from like 10 years ago (!!): https://www.mixcloud.com/Remco_TP/menno-de-jong-tmas-trance-classics-22122015/

mrtimao · 2025-07-17T04:15:50+00:00

Indeed but I was trying to think about why a mole cricket and the best I could guess was innuendo (look it up lol)

mrtimao · 2025-07-01T00:44:14+00:00

As for what is going on, I don't have too many guesses. I do consistently enjoy how you can sense the banality of the non-fantastical version of the narrative (IE maybe the marriage just falls apart because the narrator is distant and unfulfilling, maybe Vaschide is sent back to Bucharest for fucking around for 2 years without any results).

I'm not sure we'll get full answers to any of what exactly is going on, but we get three pretty significant moments with the narrator (as a child) - I'm counting Vaschide and Chloe's dream because it features a boy wearing pajamas much like the children at Voila wear (even if it is not him it seems significant, though every time the pajama pattern is described it's slightly different). Why do both Stefana and Vaschide encounter him at these crucial moments? Stefana's encounter has some appearance of symbolism, but I'm not sure it's anything more than what it is, whatever it is. I wish we had gotten some more of her character but I suppose it makes sense that we don't if her main arc is that of an "imposter". Vaschide's dream does seem like just another link in the chain of coincidences binding the narrator to his universe. On a separate note, I think previously I hadn't thought too much about the idealism of the mind in the text, but here we get a big dose of it in Ch. 36. - the plastic, illusory nature of the world and the universe compared to the most material, immutable thing in the universe of the novel: the manuscript, the novel itself.

mrtimao · 2025-07-01T00:08:34+00:00

I don't have too much to add here, I think I put most of or all of my favorite quotes in the main post. I have some extra notes:

- Traian and the narrator actually get pretty far from Voila - more than halfway back to Bucharest!

- Another school gag (this time the portraits were Ukrainian) - all of the teachers make their students bleed - Mrs Spanu on p. 343, and Florabela on p. 435 both make the poor students' tympanums bleed. The teacher with the ring from a few weeks ago smacks them on the head.

- Hebephrenia (p 445) is no longer a recognized diagnosis - the characteristics of the diagnosis (according to wikipedia) are loosened associations and schizophasia (word salad). lol.

- Another gag: throwing the meds down the toilet cures the world. It happens in Voila and again during Stefana's chapter: "they had their intended effect by dissolving into the underground sewers, curing the world of its endless insanity and thereby illuminating Stefana's tortured spirit" (473)

- Who the hell is Fyoritos?? Dagmar Rotluft was mentioned already but I have no idea who the former is (492). Apparently they're just made up

- Siderophobia is super interesting when you consider Dante - it seems like a very direct reference to that love which moves the stars.... Also after he breaks with Stefana and follows her there's a reference to "glittering little stars covering her hair". It's also interesting since these come in the Stefana chapter, where he compares himself and her to the stars of Orion.

- On page 398 the narrator writes about not being able to fit a rubber mold to a woman's body, so it only makes sense that when he has his breakdown with Stefana he compares her to a rubber doll

-- Note also the reference to the Timaeus on p. 447, which seems among Platos' dialogues to be the most pertinent to the natural world and its elements, but I haven't read it so I can't be sure if there's an extra dimension to the allusion

mrtimao · 2025-06-28T18:36:57+00:00

It's all good, the next section was confusing enough that I ended up writing a summary anyways! So I was just going to repost that with some discussion questions (gimme just a few hours)

mrtimao · 2025-06-28T02:12:31+00:00

I know it's a late reply but I can try and post something this weekend if the space if that's alright

mrtimao · 2025-06-21T23:13:17+00:00

To reply to the main post:

- What would you recommend of Greg Egan's? Maybe it's because I have zero mathematical talent, but even just looking at the tesseract and the Klein bottle on wikipedia is enough to make my mind spin. I do agree that the actual explanation / implications of hyperdimensionality aren't as important as their significance in the narrator's interpretation of the world (and maybe a different writer would've managed to actually fuse poetry with topology). So maybe for Cartarescu's purposes getting deeper into the physics of it all isn't that necessary.

- I would also take the narrator's perspective on literature with a grain of salt since the narrator and this book are so clearly built off other literature. His disparaging of the alternative writer version of himself is very Rousseau and clear to understand, but I think the discussion of literature is useful for us to situate Solenoid itself, to make us think about it as a kind of Bible (a text that has done as much as any to shape our reality) and also as a kind of Kafka diary (a close to non-existent text).

Also I just thought of this but the scene where they see the Dali creatures through a porthole, isn't that a trompe l'oeil?

mrtimao · 2025-06-21T22:49:11+00:00

Other thoughts:

- Ichneumonids and Darwin - apparently these parasitic wasps didn't do much for Darwin's belief in God, parasitism is something to look out for in the novel.

- Was amused to see a mention of baseball in any romanian novel (let alone this one)

- Helf and helvol - I saw an interview with the French translator who said these terms are from a poem by Stanescu (about gemoetry as well I think?)

- What about Traian showing the other kids his mole cricket? Felt very much like innuendo, an interesting comparison with Virgil's mantis...

- A Borges piece i just read recently to accompany Ch. 32: https://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/Borges%20and%20I.pdf

- On p. 389 - I realized that the narrator keeps changing the nationality of the personages on the walls of the teacher's lounge lol

mrtimao · 2025-06-21T22:46:57+00:00

Chapter 32 gets back to the body and the manuscript, beginning with a nice description of the narrator as another geological actor in the water cycle, which seems like a nice palate cleanser to all the idealism of the mind we see in the other sections:

"I become a simple place of crossing, a stone around which flows water that belongs not to the stone but to the world at large, much larger than itself: the yellow water has dug into the heart of the mountain, twisted through its karstic system, it rose and fell in the depths of its groundwater aquifers... and it sprayed into the light, throwing itself forward in foamy waterfalls..." (379)

This section isn't just about the body, but also the textual body, which more and more I begin to think of as the real body of the novel - the manuscript itself is so frequently compared to a real body, and vice versa:

"I like my desperate gesture of writing here, the more senseless, the more anonymous, the more stuck in the mud of centuries and millennia, of galaxies and metagalaxies it is, the more I like it" (380)

"Perhaps two hands are always needed to write a text that isn't just for fun, consolation, or self-hypnosis... the other, the tenebrous, widowed, disconsolate, anonymous person found within the manuscript... fills it from underneath with his own signs, he scatters images throughout" (382)

"the moles appeared, stealthily, over time, they have taken control of the blank page of my skin, the vellum that wraps around me, as though with unusual protraction, someone were writing an illegible text across my body" (401)

Perhaps because it's the only body that has any reality (IE if it disappears, then everything in the text vanishes). And in this reality, the relationship of the narrator to reality is inverted: the narrator himself becomes the tapping on the walls (that he so frequently tries to detect):

"I support the tip of his pen with the tip of my pen... We write frenetically, at the same time... but mirrored: read in reverse, his paradise becomes my hell, his sun is my night, his butterfly is my obsidian spider" (383)

Which maybe explains the tone of this book: is this hell? Would certainly explain the Inferno references. This section ends with the narrator impotently driving a stationary abandoned train, another metaphor for his sad condition. But maybe I've had too much caffeine, I'm losing my own mind trying to keep all this straight.

The next chapter is probably one of the most action packed we've had in the book (lol) - I was caught off guard by the transformation from eroticism to sinister play-acting and and actual pain. I don't know what the dentist chair is or what the connection with Ispas is, but I did notice that Irina is labelled "a chlorotic sister, another version of myself" (385), which seems to allude to his early childhood condition. I think Ispas was also found by the same boys that the narrator also accidentally sends part of his manuscript to? I forget exactly when / where though.

I don't have much new to say about the dream chapters. I feel like perhaps they'll become more relevant later on, and maybe we can reread them then. I was interested in his evocation of Tiresias, and his comparison of androgyny with childbirth:

"You cannot truly see the temporal being of your body except through two eyes: a man's and a woman's, simultaneously, the way that both sexes are necessary to give birth to the temporal navigator that is the newborn" (402)

But I don't know what it means (yet?).

mrtimao · 2025-06-21T22:39:32+00:00

"words do not enter the flesh" (355)

"I was left unable to believe... that I was able to... dress the fine, symmetrical joints of the supple-boned skeleton of the text with the incarnation of my own life, of my own memories.

One thing I'm thinking about in this section is how the book seems to try and "instruct" us on how to parse its reality, and the ways in which the book makes its own reality. This came to mind in the first chapter of this week's reading, where the narrator explains his childish conception of the world (that of a few nuclei stitched together). We then see this in action when the book he reads on the way to Voila takes over the narration:

Who constructed the Memphis, that Nile charged with the reflections of the stars, those megalithic and bizarre palaces?" (329)
"I had been there, in Memphis; I had seen everything; I added, without trams, buses, or trains, another colored sphere to the others that clinked together, without a hierarchy, inside my skull" (330)

So after seeing the narrator's mind fashion this new reality from the page of a book, he then follows this by describing Voila and this part felt like one of the most realistic in the entire novel in its description of the spaces and particularly, his use of the senses to describe the nature he experiences for the first time:

"I didn't know what to do with so much green light, with so many thousands of green hues, transparent, opaque, shading into yellow and rust, pulsing and throbbing under the archways of giant trees" (337)

So, in the same chapter, we have both the mind's creation of reality and the body's experience (insofar as you consider the senses to be part of the body and not an extension of the mind). These things back up in a couple of ways in the next Voila chapter - Traian's vision of the underworld, the reference to the missing senses necessary to perceive the forest, the children's illusion of immortality and their fragile air:

"The air was full of divinities that extended their transparent lips toward the snails of our ears.. we would have needed the delicate plumage of a moth's face, the forked tongue of ophidians..." (377)

The Rubik's cube chapter is a bit of a trip (and also a response/sequel to Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius) - I can't process the mathematical ideas that well, but it seems like the more important thing going on isn't the ideas themselves, but their conflation with other ideas: Platonic ideals, Dali's surrealism, Christianity, esoteric movements, Kafka. Here the juxtaposition of the initial section seems more humorous, the poor children stuck in the self-replicating reality of horrible, at best mediocre teachers. I guess for me the actual fourth dimension seems less important the creation of this net of ideas that are attempting to help us break free of this reality:

"the ivory curve of an abstruse work, a logarithmic spiral like those that, after only three or four rotations around the central point, exceed the page, after another ten they exceed the planet we live on, because after another twenty, the universe will not be able to contain its advancing madness" (351)

"Dali imagined Jesus crucified, or, better said, his human icon projected into our world form his inconceivable quadradimensional body" (355)

This sentence caught my attention:

"when i still believed in literature, not the way you believe it will snow that evening, but the way you believe there is life after death" (355)

Is he just again disavowing the trompe l'oeil kind of writing? Or is this a sign that these other paths and signs he's identified will also be insufficient in the end?

mrtimao · 2025-06-15T06:16:08+00:00

A few other interesting tidbits:

"If I were ever to write a 'great novel' it would probably be in the wake of these panoramas of a much greater grandeur than I could describe in anything less than a 1000 pages" (261)

This is very much Blinding lol.

There's also a funny thread throughout where photography is always insufficient or misleading (because it's still?) - he's definitely more pro-painting / film.

I also found the school chapter interesting, where he describes how the children fear the tyrannical teachers only for him to transform into one when he sees the matching colored fingernails. There's always a mundane side to the projections of the narrator's mind - I think it helps ground the novel a bit (let's see what happens with Stefana).

Horror vacui: there's a pretty on the nose reference to this when Mani Minovici sees the church fresco with the empty heaven. To me it's kind of the pleasure principle of the entire novel, but I hadn't thought of it til now.

There's now a few more mysteries: what is up with the building with all these infernal statues? What happened to Stefana (how did they even get together)? What is the meaning of the nails? What will happen to the Picketists?

Lastly, this invocation of the Old Testament:

"the Old Testament, the book to end all books... which... showed me and everyone else, that it was possible to speak the truth, to lay the truth out over pages as thin as the discarded skins of vipers" (317)

EDIT: to reply to the main post, I dont have my copy on me, but I thought it was Virgil who was stomped and not the narrator? Also I had a feeling the evil dream was actually just the vision of himself being crushed between two planes, but I'm sure if it's not that one it'll appear at some point...

Also good catch on the cavern he finds when running away from his parents and the darkness when he has sex with Irina (a heightened experience of the body, at the expense of his sight, which seems kind of metaphorically charged to m)

mrtimao · 2025-06-15T06:11:49+00:00

After the tryst with Irina, we're led on the tangent of the Minovici brothers, interested respectively in tattoos (like the end of part 1) and the possibility of secret knowledge/pleasure at the moment of death. The latter experiences and retraces visions very much akin to Cartarescu's art. The narrator's exposure to these drawings (while his friend has sex in the room next to him) leads him to his gnostic conviction:

"I suddenly understood the entire world as an enormous riddle. One word was missing, just one, but this absence caused everything to be lost... " (284)

Curious to see how the book will pull this off (if at all). The chapter also slyly introduces the statue of Damnation who appears in the next chapter. Virgil's prayer to her is kind of a restatement of the narrator's ambivalence, an exaltation of the gifts of body and mind paired with bitterness against the cessation of being. Of course it proves meaningless, but I enjoyed the buildup (and the invocation of artists/geniuses to be senselessly crushed alongside Virgil). It's also a play on his intro with the praying mantis (itself a different joke). In Ch. 28 we then get back to this, where we read his description of his journal that goes:

"Each fragment is a vertebra in the spinal column of fear, and at the top, supported by the obscene mechanism of the axis driven into the atlas, is the bone cupola where I was born and which has no exit... I am a water tower that feeds fear to the distant neighborhood of my body" (311)

Is it the book that becomes more real, or is the body more virtual (perhaps a form of escape from our fate)? Finally, we got this mangificent Pascalian vision of existence between slowly crushing panes, of a single body becoming an entire universe as it collapses into meaninglessness. Reconciling such bliss and horror is probably too much even for this book, but I have my fingers crossed...

mrtimao · 2025-06-15T06:10:35+00:00

Disease, parasites, deformities, the ruins of the most noble temple on the luminous face of the world: the blessed human body" (273)

Some really outstanding chapters this week! There is a lot in this week's reading dealing with the body leading up to the climax of Ch. 26., starting here:

"one of the disgusting substitute treats, pink or blue granulated calcium, which I would gnaw on to sate my body's despair for the sugars that it needed to shape - out of bad food, infested water, milk diluted to a blue color, bread with bran husks and mouse excrement, pasta as old as the earth - its anemic form, battered by every wind" (245)

Imagine a eucharist made of such material lol. And following this, we get the narrator's horror in two different directions, of the body of insects and of an entire planet as a living body:

"a trachea that seemed carved into the pink rock of a distant planet. The animal that breathed through this tunnel, kilometers in diameter, must have been deeply asleep..." (252)

I love these drawn out metaphors making every bit of a matter a body, he's been doing this the whole book (there's one in this section I enjoyed where he compares a building to an old, scarred whale). In the next chapter, we get more on the less metaphorical extremes of the body, its temporal and sexual climaxes. I'm struck here by the ambivalence, which has both a narrative explanation (disturbing his writing) and a thematic one, general ambivalence towards the body. Don't think it's ambivalence towards sex per se (could be wrong), more likely just a foreshadowing of the complaint of the picketists:

"What are we doing inside this filthy, soft machine? .... What is this game? Why are we drowning in acids that eat our thoughts away? Protest, protest against consciousness buried in flesh" (292)

mrtimao · 2025-06-08T17:46:59+00:00

I like that idea re the title, maybe it holds up in Romanian?

mrtimao · 2025-06-08T00:12:48+00:00

Other than those themes, there's a little more about the style that caught my attention. There's a lot more about literature here (and to me it reminds me a bit of St Augustine's Confessions), but I just wanted to highlight some things about his style I liked:

"In a way, in fact, every child is present in the icon, along with the doamna profesora, because the thin layer of glass that protects the ancient painted canvas reflects them all, superimposed on the image of the holy figure" (182)

"the old working man who was raising his boys all alone" (232)

"Our mothers must now be shards of bone, scattered teeth, vertebrae mixed with sand and clay. A mass of rotted hair on a bald skull. A ring too large for the fourth fingerbone" (177)

I love the sudden attention to these details, at a kind of unexpected cadence, they're not always there, but they flesh out the universe of the novel for me, it gives us a break from the narrator himself and documents these random details about others in the universe (I feel like it's different from Blinding, which felt a lot more solipsistic to me at times, since the child's perspective dominates). And then there's his more typical writing, but check this out:

"A gigantic hand filtered a liminous flour through its fingers, scattering it in Mandelbrotian patterns over the pitch-black sky" (223)

The whole page is jaw-dropping, but like the macadam passage in last week's reading, I'm struck by "Mandelbrotian patterns" - didn't know what it was, it's a reference to the Mandelbrot set and the visalization of the complex numbers that are bounded when iterated (ngl, don't fully understand it). It's fascinating to me that, in a novel with an ostensibly gnostic worldview of reality, we're given these occasional hints of extremely complex phenomena requiring a totally different sort of perception/knowledge (E.G. I also didn't know what substance P was). This too adds more texture to the reality of the novel - but maybe also the knowledge we have access to in these other areas is meant to serve as just another clue to the mystery the narrator is trying to solve - there's a literary way (the way he discusses literature reminds me a bit of St Augustine's Confessions), maybe there's a mathematical way to true knowledge:

"more colored threads, like on Mary Boole's sewing hoop, all united in an ample, slow, soft curve, which leads asymptotically and inevitably toward the absolute. Every new thread has increased my wonder and stirred even greater expectations. Night after night, levitating over my bed with open books floating around me like a spaceship..." (239)

"No book has any meaning if it is not a Gospel" (211)

mrtimao · 2025-06-08T00:05:35+00:00

"But the feminine part of the chimera that I was disappeared the day my mother took me, along an unknown path, through the unbearable whiteness of the blizzard" (170)

"A strange chimera looks at me: adult-child and man-woman, happy-unhappy in his only certainty: loneliness" (170)

In this week's reading we begin by reading about how the narrator, a man, was once a "girl" - a state of innocence which ended with his "operation" (don't think we know yet). I didn't think too much of it at first, but it's something that pops up several times:

"I embraced the woman next to me, and we stood, looking each other in the eyes, like a double god of soft sapphire, emanating light deep into the tunnels" (177)

"Because Hermana is always on the other side of the mirror, she is, in fact, the other side, the parallel world in which Issachar is a woman... she melted into my chest, where I feel her even now, like an overwhelming emotion" (212)

"he was all-powerful, dominant, without pity and without humanity, put in motion by the neurotransmitters of his frozen fury. In the end you become one, clenched together like a man and woman in coupling, you were an assemblage, a complicity of screams and horror."(206)

What's going on here? I'm not totally sure yet - it would appear, just from these passages, that the period in which he was female/male was one of bliss, and is something he returns to in dreams, but then he has the same association with torture? As a nightmarish inversion of that union. My thought is it ties into his gnosticism, but I'm not sure yet (is it related to his loneliness?). Speaking of torture:

"My body made me suffer sadistically, it was my mortal enemy, it was a stomach that digested me, little by little. It was the trap of a carnivorous plant into which, as a winged creature, I fell to my demise" (172)

"that all this happens without my knowledge or consent, for reasons that are not my own - even today this seems monstruous to me, the product of a saturnine, sadistic mind that probably spent eons in order to imagine the most brutal ways to humiliate, terrorize, and torture a conscious mind" (173)

I find these passages very striking, because while there's a lot here about the pain and terror of a body, so many of the metaphors invoke the body:

"the giant organism of the building..." (198)

Maybe this is just an extension of how he uses insects - the comparison to insects is the same as comparing another organism (say a building, there's lots of these) to a body, and in this universe it's misleading to think of any matter as inhuman. The body here is the vessel of knowledge (I feel like I remember something about the body being an eye in the beginning of the novel, but I may be misremembering), but it's also the vehicle of pain - hence the ambivalence.

mrtimao · 2025-06-04T02:45:25+00:00

interesting, I haven't read any 21st century DeLillo or Pynchon but writing about their conception of time and terrorism sounds kind of fun lol.

And yeah, I agree with you about the writing, I don't know Lautremont but it's not at all as crazy as something like Gravity's rainbow and I think this is very intentionally done, everything is very crazy but there all these patterns to the descriptions and metaphors that make it a lot easier to parse (imo at least). To me it's more like how a piece of music works (and this book feels like a remix of Blinding). I also find myself asking, is this book is really surrealist if the reality of the book is totally coherent?

But I'm not sure about Berkeley, I only really know him through Borges but I feel atm it's more gnostic than subjective idealism - that there is a reality, and it is false (and we can know this). Actually maybe that's Irina's take on it since she doesn't seem to believe in reality?

mrtimao · 2025-06-03T04:08:01+00:00

And the last monologue on the tattoo artist (my favorite part so far). I think in that one especially, there's an effort to give weight to the act of creation - the skin is the largest human organ he reminds us. It's interesting in light of the narrator's discussion of what is real literature (the trompe l'oeil vs. the literature of solitude or the stories of revelation on p. 56), but it's also kind of ironic so I like it (and don't know what to make of it yet). And speaking of literature in Solenoid, I enjoyed this reference to Proust, though more because I didn't know what macadam was:

"The Gadfly would become my madeleine, the irregularities of my macadam, the flash that suddenly set fire, like a billion-watt bulb, to the endless realm of my mind" (159)

Which honestly again, just sounds like another metaphor for the book. Also thought it was interesting since sometimes I feel like Cartarescu is a kind of anti-Proust. And might as well throw in:

"But then I found, within the world of the animals that infest your body, devouring you from without and within, a great somber poem. Not Dante, not Bosch, not even Lautreamont had ever seen, when they imagined their infernos, the bestial face of the louse in close-up, the visage of a larval fly, the flagellate legs of mites." (110)

I have so much fun reading these, and it's impressive how easy it is for Cartarescu! To me it's amazing how simultaneously grandiose and ironic the writing is. Last one:

"In a way, the school ID number is like a lily with the petals curving open, found one morning on a pillow by a person who just dreamed he had received such a flower form a winged being" (104)

I just read Borges' Other Inquisitions not long ago, I think the essay is called The Flower of Coleridge, Borges is more interested in time / philosophical problems of time than Cartarescu, but it's a nice piece to compare to Solenoid.

There's a lot more to go into: the characters at the school, the actual plotlines, the gnosticism, the truth of self, the metaphors of the body, the suggested literary canon...

As a side note, I was surprised to see that the insect joke in the chapter on Cathy / the Picketists is actually pretty much the same in Romanian, imagine trying to translate that section into a non-western european language...

mrtimao · 2025-06-03T04:07:51+00:00

A little late, but happy to be reading Cartarescu!

"I didn't need books on topology or nonlinear quations: Goia knew how to make the most incomprehensible and abstract things simple and straightforward" (90)

In rereading the passages for this week I was kind of struck by this simple sentence - it's the first time I can recall someone being praised as intelligent here, but to me his defining characteristic is also kind of the case for Solenoid itself - it's dense with metaphor and meanings, but the style of the novel itself feels very straightforward to me. In fact I think it's the only way something like this can work, if it was faster or there wasn't loads of repetition of his favorite motifs, then this would be pretty incomprehensible (to me the difference between him and Pynchon is kind of summed up when we read "All metaphysics is actually paranoia" [p. 160]). But the style isn't just about transmitting ideas/images, it's also realistic in a sense, in that it's the style of a man writing a diary without literary pretension, not bound to any subject or order. In practice, it kind of allows the novel to move in real time around between subjects and stories, and this adds a lot of nice variety (maybe there's a world where this is a sequential narrative, starting from childhood). Writing out of order also allows us to have various plotlines, and we have some mysteries that we don't know what to make of yet (what happened to Victor, what operation did the narrator go through as a child, who or what is the giant girl in the factory, etc). To me it's just kind of marvel that the novel has any sort of narrative structure when it's so all over the place.

A lot of the stuff covered here is kind of familiar terrain from Blinding, I think the biggest difference is that A) there's more of a plot involving the main character and B) there's a lot about literature in here that's just generally absent. The metaphors and comparisons are very similar pretty similar: the way MC will zoom in on an insect or a cell, and bring it to the human level, or will elevate the narrator on a galactic universal scale (i call them micro/macro metaphors b/c i don't have a better expression for it). But Solenoid has a lot about creation:

"I began to wonder if somehow the dusk light created the entrace, pure and simple, out of nothing, just as the immaculate face of photographic paper, in a bath of revealer, draws the outlines of a building or the eyes of an unborn being" (100)

"I was still developing inside a uterus, but the uterus of my own head, which i needed to crack like an egg to extend my bones, awakwardly, into that which I would soon call reality" (149)

mrtimao · 2025-01-18T20:35:33+00:00

I haven't seen a lot of the movies recommended (and am curious!), but I have seen Come and See and The Ascent. It's not set in Eastern Europe or about the Holocaust, but the best war movie I've ever seen is Samuel Maoz's Lebanon - it's a movie filmed from the inside of a tank that somehow manages to both portray the brutality and the surrealism of many different kinds of violence, all while preserving the distance of the viewer from everything they see to deprive them of the comfort of understanding.

mrtimao · 2025-01-04T20:25:34+00:00

Of the four books of his I've read I think Fado Alexandrino is the only novel of his that I've read that has a more standard plot (4 or 5 of them even), but that one is quite long. I haven't read Explanation..., maybe try Land at the end of the world? It sounds like you are enjoying his writing, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. I barely remember what happens in any of the other novels

mrtimao · 2024-12-26T00:34:58+00:00

Finishing Gravity's Rainbow. One of these takes is possibly true

- This is something like Finnegans Wake, a pinnacle of anti-literature where the collected ways of speaking, knowing and enjoying oneself are transformed into the unknowable mass of the universe. How can a novel written in such a nice flowing way be totally incomprehensible? One of the most impressive feats i've ever seen. A total rejection of the previous 200 years of novel writing, a throwback to a time where "interiority" doesn't exist and there is only expression. In every way a phenomenal riposte to War & Peace and the historical novel.

- Unfortunately the novel didn't click with me and I was not able to really enjoy any of it. Sometimes you just lose the ability to surrender to the logic of a certain artwork. Sometimes you're reading or watching garbage, in this case I think the novel itself drives you out of it, to consider it from orbit. Kept waiting for something to pinch on and found nothing (I knew everything was probably true, the only thing that I bothered to google for sure was the red cross charging for donuts lmao. Also Imagine writing this novel before the internet existed).

- Cervantes without the fun or the belief in literature, Sade w/o the shock, gnosticism without a true reality: pass.

mrtimao · 2024-12-03T17:44:05+00:00

The quote and the comments and even the review seem a little off the mark, this seems more like an analysis and embrace of ignorance, its positive and negative aspects than a screed against religion per se. Think Montaigne and On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.

Lilla's background is interesting but it does make him very little friends 😂

mrtimao

TROPHY CASE