A Date with Destiny - Solenoid

I first discovered Mircea Cartarescu back in 2001 when my college roommate introduced me to his poems, which I later decided to translate into English for the Traductology course which I passed with flying colors, the professor being thoroughly impressed with my translations. Curious by nature I wanted to see what his prose was all about and I was struck by how creative he could be in his short novel "Travesti" (1994).

In 2005 He came to my hometown to launch his easy-to-digest book "Why we love women” (2004) and I even managed to ask him a question. That was the moment I became one of his fans. I continued reading his masterpieces, because for me, everything he has written is highly remarkable and his writing demands to be taken into account when committees decide to nominate writers for the Nobel Prize of Literature. I am an avid reader but out of the thousands writers I have read he is the most powerful and imaginative. With each page you read, you become more amazed at how incredible his mind and writing is. At the end of 2014 he visited us again, to pick up his award for the best Romanian writer of the year, nominated by a local literary committee but meeting everybody's approval. He even donated all the money he received for a good cause: promoting young writers.

(M. Cartarescu talking about "Solenoid")

Back to present times, two weeks ago Mircea Cartarescu came once more in a campaign to promote his latest masterpiece, “Solenoid”, published in November last year, the book he described as his most impressive in terms of creation, topic and why not, time to write. It took him almost 5 years to finish the 800 page novel and he stated that he actually hoped the readers would complete it in three - or four months, taking their time to digest and absorb, but in my case, this will not happen, because I have already read 200 pages and I am planning on finishing it by the end of March... just in time for my Romanian Writers Challenge!