SOLENOID by Mircea Cărtărescu (640pp) (5/5)

"Art has no meaning if it's not an escape. If it's not born of a prisoner's despair."

“A prisoner on death row could have his cell lined with bookshelves, all wonderful books, but what he actually needs is an escape plan.”

"The old man seemed delirious, but I knew better than anyone that delirium is not the detritus of reality but a part of reality itself, sometimes the most precious part."

"The milk of her body entered the child's, where, like a Eucharist, it became body and blood, spinal fluid and endorphins, through a magic and mystery the mind cannot comprehend."

"...'in theory everything works, but in practice, we're dead,' as the shop teacher, Eftene, wittily put it."

"We are an impossible formation of the aleatory, endless world; we are the coin landing on an edge so thin that it cuts itself in half a billion times per second."

This is a masterpiece written by a genius. A book that breaks out of itself, then breaks out of that, too. An unnamed school teacher in Bucharest, Romania seeks to assemble the riddle of his life. Follow the path which the clues left to him in dreams, visions, great reading, and life lead. We follow along through this journey in the form of notebooks written by our narrator as he pieces together the mysteries for us. I won't spoil but a bit of this journey, I'd rather the review reader becomes the book reader and goes in unbiased.

This book is a lot longer of a read than the page count alone implies, I wasn't able to read much more than 50pg per sitting. The material is dense, the vocabulary is abstruse, and the thread of narrative becomes hyaline thin. For your consideration, a short list of words I learned: parturition, meconium, aleatory, chlorisis, animalcule, hypogeum, hypnagogic, oneiric, abulic, autochthonous, oubliette. (All but three of these words appear in red underline in editing this "review"). I strongly STRONGLY recommend reading this book.

To preface this brief review I'd like to note that I know very very little about South Africa, the Mandelas, and the struggle against apartheid. I knew what is often said about Winnie -- that she supported necklacing, that she was far more violent. Of course we all know about Nelson's unjustly, unthinkably long imprisonment.

But the truth of the savagery of the apartheid regime cannot be summarized, can hardly be understood clearly by someone lucky enough to lead a life of freedom like mine own. One cannot read this book without recognizing that Winnie had a violent streak, a deep hypocrisy in her thinking, and a seeming narcissism. And yet, her influence cannot be understated, and has grown since her death as the final chapter details. When one reads the injustices against her, it almost makes forgivable her violent nature and her violent actions.

Then there is Nelson. A character who jumps off the page with his wide strong shoulders and handsome visage. The power of presence most starkly shown early on when Gaur Radebe -- who worked at the same law firm as Nelson as the unofficial liaison to the black clientele -- resigns his position to allow Nelson to fill it, seeing what potential lie latent in the strapping young man. Like Winnie, he has his black marks. His relationship with his first wife, his philandering, his lying and strongarming. And yet, a great great man, a man who knew what his existence here could mean, who knew what was possible for him to do.

It's a very worthwhile read.

I've been thinking a lot lately about forgetting. Last year my memory took a significant hit in an encounter with a sort of post-Strep fatigue syndrome. When that happens, when the things you thought you knew start to slip out of view, when the world around you starts to narrow, when even your perception can't bring you the flowers you're accustomed to... You're reminded that you are your memories and perceptions. "YOU" is an ongoing experience machine, majestic and wonderful, but error prone and fundamentally unstable and uncontrollable.

The communist government makes this all too clear, how fallible we are. We forget often how much we project onto the lives of people we read, or watch. Books like this are good to show how people broadly sympathetic to our (liberal, West European, left sympathetic but anti-communist) values saw the Eastern bloc from the inside.

Perhaps we all need to be more upset about the pears than the tanks, after all.

Perhaps the best book I've read. For the grandson of a survivor (myself) a book like this, written by the granddaughter of a survivor (Berest) cuts almost too deep. The violinists, Jewish prisoners themselves, forced to play in front of the moribund line of prisoners that my grandfather painted, depicted in this book. Life on the run, as my grandfather also experienced. Almost too much to bear. One must know these stories. Wildly powerful a book. So many parallels to my own family -- my mother's father (descendant of Eastern European Ashkenazi, exact details unknown to me): Sidney Wolfe, Emma Rabinovitch's father: Maurice Wolf.

Impossible to type simple words in a text box on a website using a computer that even graze the feelings I have.

Hard to grok that my grandfather, who lived his last few years alongside me, held me in the air at 90 years old, who died in my childhood home while I myself was there, had seen what's written in this book. Had himself been arrested, taken. To imagine that he survived. That he survived. Survived. That he survived. Very hard to understand.

God.

We Americans find ourselves in a dangerous constitutional moment, but the grand majority of even the brightest minds are failing to see it. This book -- written in 2010 -- warns of a frightening number of possibilities in the realm of executive power abuse. In so many ways Ackerman predicts the Trump phenomena, the media personality rising to power on the backs of soundbites and mendacity. Ackerman predicts the sinful actions that Trump was asking Vice President Pence to take. Luckily Pence -- for all you could criticize him for -- is a true American patriot, a believer in the constitution. What will happen in 2028 if instead J.D. Vance holds that seat?

Through tracking the presidency through the centuries, you see a pattern of constant executive aggrandizement. For example, the White House Counsel, established under FDR as a weak body of a handful of lawyers, is now a hulking behemoth that provides presidents with powerful well-written nearly Supreme Court level legal opinions that nearly always come down on the side of the president. By the time that the Supreme Court would hear a case on said issue, the public pressure has mounted such that it's often in the court's interest for legitimacy to back down from the challenge. That's one example of executive aggrandizement of so many, I'll allow the review reader to become the book reader to see the others.

He also discusses issues like the fall of mainstream media. He doesn't see the social media rise in full, but a rewrite of this book would include the Twitter/Facebook political news phenomenon as well. He discusses how the military has been politicized, not just in the militarymen being more political themselves, but also the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986 allowing the Joint Chief of Staff to sit at the table the National Security Counsel. Ackerman suggests lessening the importance of the JCS so the president wouldn't have a direct line to the military leader. He discusses the rise in extremist candidates thanks to the caucus/primary system, whereby only the party loyalists have a say in which candidate will go to the general, which naturally causes extremism to thrive.

In the end there are some excellent suggestions, I'll describe my favorite one: the Supreme Executive Tribunal. This would be a 9 person body that would provide the definitive legal counsel to the executive branch. Instead of the WHC and OLC (which serve at the behest of the president) the Supreme Executive Tribunal would have senate confirmed long serving (almost) judges in its ranks. If the president was shot down by the Tribunal, it could provide a real backstop to the later Supreme Court decision declining the presidents attempted seizure of power. Or, even better, the president would stop before even getting to the Supreme Court. There are many more suggestions: Deliberation Day, a holiday of town halls before election day whereat the citizenry would discuss and debate the policies laid out by the candidates before election day, or a national fund for media, providing funding (by vote) to outlets providing unbiased and real analysis of news.

This is an EXCELLENT book. Surely not nearly enough people have read this, as not much appears when you search it's name. Well, they're missing out sorely, or more importantly, they're running blindly into these crises as exampled in the book that may occur soon. I have blind faith in the constitution, but I'm quite worried about challenges to it in the near future. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops.