The novel shuttles among drily grotesque evocations of the narrator’s life, his phantasmagoric dreams, and his obsessive search-along with a group of anti-death advocates called The Picketists-for a portal through which to escape the terrestrial plane. The unnamed narrator has abandoned his youthful aspirations to become a writer, though he zealously maintains a diaristic “report of anomalies.” He languishes in obscurity as an elementary school teacher in Bucharest, which he calls “a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things.” Bookish and febrile, he lives in a boat-shaped house built atop one of the city’s five “solenoids,” torus-shaped metallic structures that tap into the energy of the fourth dimension, as well as providing earthly benefits such as the ability to levitate during sex.
Cartarescu ( Blinding) weaves a monumental antinovel of metaphysical longing and fabulist constructions.
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