And his parents’ home was full of books.Įvery night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of romances which had been my mother’s. I also hope you enjoy the irregular illustration for this trilogy, some iterations of Rousseau, generated by AI (although they don’t look the least bit like Rousseau ).Įarly childhood in Geneva is explicitly formative for Rousseau. I hope you enjoy these letters, which will be less analytical and more impressionistic, featuring long, prolix quotations so that you can get a sense of Rousseau’s prolix yet compelling style. Īnd boy are we in for a big one, an “ancillary” read that was just as long as the primary text. These letters are meant to accompany my review piece that ran in Asymptote. We’ll try to elucidate the many literary and historical threads woven into this meganovel, one book at a time. Solenoid is a massive, ambitious novel that, in addition to spinning a long conspiratorial narrative, kind of summarizes the last century of modernist aesthetics and art in Europe and their relationship with scientific and mathematical knowledge.

The Solenoid Notebooks is a series of letters reporting on the capacious field of literary and bibliographical references within Cărtărescu’s big book, translated by Sean Cotter.

Jean jacque rousseau confessions