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Brazen, brilliant symphony of a novel
Sunday, March 22, 2009 Reviewed by Joanne Hayden

Solo

By Rana Dasgupta

Fourth Estate €18

During a key scene in Solo, the 100year-old central character imagines a conversation with his only true love, a Jewish woman he met while studying chemistry in Berlin in the 1920s. ‘‘You must know I died long a go,” Ulrich’s former girlfriend says. ‘‘You know we’re not really here and it’s only a dream?”

‘‘It’s a dream, Clara,” Ulrich replies. ‘‘But it’s not only a dream. There is far more to us than what we live.” A novel of two very distinct and beautifully complementary halves or ‘movements’, Solo starts out as a history of one man and his native Bulgaria, and opens up into a 21st century fantasy, a mesmeric defence of dreamers and dreams.

In the First Movement, Life, Ulrich sifts through his ten decades, remembering wars, coups, failed ideologies, dead friends, lost love and his fruitless hankerings to be a great musician and trailblazing chemist.

Each chapter is named after a chemical element, the fate of chemistry in the 20th century a barometer of humanity’s highs and lows - the science that led to the eradication of certain illnesses was also put to genocidal use.

Neither hero nor antihero, conformist nor dissident , Ulrich blunder s through his youth and adulthood, relinquishing his true passions out of fear, or duty, or a double-edged instinct for self-preservation.

Responding to his mother’s pleas, he abandons Clara and his studies in Berlin, and returns to his family in Sofia. He never leaves Bulgaria again.

Now blind - following an accident with a can of sulphuric acid - and dependent on the kindness of neighbours, he channel surfs, pondersh is ‘ ‘ shredded inheritance’’ and makes lists: a list of things he would tell the son he never knew. ‘‘A list of things that compromise in his view, the minimal requirements for a happy life.”

A concise epic of resignation and regret, the First Movement maps so much thwarted potential and cyclical abuses of power that, despite Rana Dasgupta’s unfailingly gorgeous writing, reading it is a little like listening to contemporary news coverage; there’s little space for hope to breathe. Which is why the Second Movement, Daydreams, comes as a huge relief, and, with perfect timing, transforms Solo from a fairly conventional novel into an exhilarating visionary feat.

In five chapters, each named after a sea creature, Ulrich’s ‘‘private fictions’’ surface.

Friends and treasured possessions are resurrected and reinvented; imaginary children are born. These children - Khatuna, a Machiavellian Georgian woman, her poet brother, Irakli, and Boris, a Bulgarian violinist plucked from obscurity by a record company mogul - are extraordinary, extreme individuals whose destinies converge in present day New York.

While Khatuna becomes a security expert in Manhattan, and Irakli searches for meaning and connection in a flippant, fragmented world, Boris plays the violin - how he wants, where he wants and for whom he wants.

As his daydreams un spool, Ulrich occasionally wanders into his own narrative, making suitably postmodern ‘ author ‘ appearances in what is, on one level, a dynamic meditation on the nature of fiction. Solo is both brazenly and subtly self-reflexive. Its defence of dreams may as well be a defence of the relevance, scope and transformative possibilities of the contemporary novel.

Its most brilliant ongoing twist is its understated, multi-layered exploration of how a writer’s unconscious might work. Dasgupta allows the reader space to make connections, respond to echoes and draw conclusions about why Ulrich chooses to construct his story as he does.

His prose is a finely balanced mixture of luxury and restraint, full of vivid close-ups and surprising details that seem, like the fictions of which they are a part, to have a life beyond themselves.

Thematically and stylistically, he casts his net wide, illustrating the extent of what can be lost with censorship, repression and the erasure of collective memory. In the early 1900s, Bulgaria was aligned with Asia as well as Europe, but in Ulrich’s final years, the country sends troops to assist the American occupation of Iraq. ‘‘How time changes things, he thinks: making people forget who they were and turning them against their own kind.”

Unsurprisingly, Dasgupta is at his most exuberant when writing about music. Solo is beautifully symphonic - elegiac and prophetic, underpinned by intelligence, compassion and a wonderfully unfettered imagination. It’s a necessary as well as a timely novel.

When I finished it I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it all over again.

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