Solenoid

A Bucharest high-school teacher in late-Communist Romania keeps a diary that opens with the failed 1977 poetry reading that should have launched his literary career, and spirals into a 600-page meditation on dreams, mathematics, sleep paralysis, the misery of teaching in a falling-apart school, and the hidden solenoid in the basement of his house that may be lifting his bed off the floor at night into other dimensions. Cărtărescu builds the novel as a diary, an essay, an autobiographical fantasia, and a philosophical investigation of whether literature can be a door opened onto the sacred. The book won the 2024 Dublin Literary Award.