Solenoid

Description

The story is presented as the diary of an unnamed high school teacher in Communist Bucharest—a man who once dreamed of being a great writer but now lives a life of “divine mediocrity.” He buys a bizarre, boat-shaped house that contains a massive, buried solenoid (an electromagnetic coil) in the basement. This device has the power to defy gravity, causing the narrator to levitate and opening portals to fourth-dimensional spaces. The novel spirally expands from the bleak, “nauseous” reality of 1980s Romania—queuing for food, lice outbreaks, and the absurdity of the education system—into a psychedelic exploration of mathematics, dream-investigators, and the search for an escape route from the “prison” of three-dimensional existence.