Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful prose wrought from chemistry and music makes a fascinating novel, 12 Aug 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
I read Dasgupta's first novel Tokyo Cancelled back in 2007 and it was one of the most original debut novels I've read in recent years; it has really stayed with me. A modern take on the Canterbury Tales, Tokyo Cancelled is a linked story cycle in which a group of passengers stranded in an airport indulge in a spot of storytelling to pass the time.
So I was really looking forward to his second novel - and it didn't disappoint either. Solo is the story of one man, his life and his daydreams, and is a novel in two distinct 'movements'.
In the first, we meet Ulrich - a Bulgarian. Now blind and 100 years old, he is reliant on his neighbour to look after him, and all he has left in life is to muse about his long life, and dream. As a young man, Ulrich has the potential to become a talented musician, but his father hates music and burns his violin. Ulrich turns to science, and goes to Berlin to study, and as a student he was there to pick up Einstein's dropped papers, but his studies and a romance with a Czech scientist Clara, are thwarted having to return home to Sofia where his father is ill. There he falls for Magdelena, the sister of his late best friend Boris who had been executed for sedition. They marry and have a child, but it doesn't last. Magdelena is not content with Ulrich being and accountant in a leather factory and leaves him to go to the USA, taking his son with him. Ulrich ends up then working as a small cog in a Barium Chloride factory in the chemical industry burgeoning under Communist control.
Feeling stifled in his life, Ulrich is worried about the effects of chemistry, he tells his mother ... "A long time ago, Boris and I had a debate about chemistry. I said it was the science of life, and he said it brought only death. Now I see that our views were simply two halves of the same thing."
By the time Communism ends, chemistry has ruined his homeland. "Bulgarian sheep had miscarriages and died, and the cows went mad. Children were born with cancers and deformities. Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper."
Ulrich's life story ends for now with musings about daydreams which leads into the second movement of this book. We meet a new cast of characters: Boris, a Bulgarian musican inspired by the Gypsy tradition, Georgian Khatuna - a girl who knows what she wants and will stop at nothing to get it - her younger poet brother Irakli, and `Plastic' Munari - a top record producer in New York. Their stories start off separately - reminiscent in style of those in Tokyo cancelled, then gradually entwine as Boris is discovered by Plastic who is discovered by Khatuna and the circle is completed by Ulrich writing himself into their story.
Bulgaria's story too comes to life. The author cleverly blends in fact with fiction to make the industrial hotpot of Eastern Europe under its successive waves of rule feel very real. It also resonates with chemistry - not just the physical chemistry of science but the emotional chemistry of failed relationships and thwarted ambition. If chemistry is the glue of this sweeping novel, then music is the spirit, always in the ether somewhere - particularly the folk music of the Gypsy violins. Its sweeping scale and dazzling descriptive prose makes up for the slight jarring between the two halves. I loved it.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting and unique, 31 Mar 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
A genuinely original book of tremendous power and grace. The writing is gorgeous, the style entirely original, with a strange and haunting story that begins in straightforward fashion - the memories of a 100 years old man from Sophia looking back on his life.
His story stops and we're suddenly introduced to a group of new characters living apparently unconnected lives in new locations. Slowly the story corkscrews back on itself and connections and shared histories begin to appear.
One of the most unusual books I've ever read, surprisingly easy to digest, beautifully written and highly recommended.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Nothing to recommend it, 17 May 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
There are some novels which, when you read them, you can 'see' the people as real people and the events as real events, they transport you to the place and time which is being written about. On the reverse of that there are also novels where the people and events feel exactly like characters and a plot in a novel. 'Solo' falls in the latter category - no where does it feel that the people being portrayed are real people and their actions and speech are nothing more than plot conventions.
The first part deals with the memories of a 100-year old Bulgarian called Ulrich. This part is written in an increasingly used technique which is cropping up in modern fiction nowadays - it is written from a remove where significant events are finished in a sentence and years wiped out in a paragraph. This section never gets close to fleshing out the main character and he stays trapped within the confines of words on a page rather than being a living breathing person.
The second half deals with his daydreams - which probably excuses the glaring inconsistency in the narrative where on one page the World Trade Center is still standing and about five pages later it has collapsed and there is war in Afghanistan, all within the same time frame, if it wasn't in a so called 'fantasy' within a supposed reality it would seem like bad and lazy writing. Unfortunatly the daydreams part doesn't add anything to the novel and feels rather pointless.
Of course all of this is excused because it is magical-realism and probably slightly post-modern (fiction within a fiction). If I had found the novel well-written and containing more than generic characters carrying out generic actions - the 'plots' of both halves are fairly obvious - I may have forgiven some of the shortcomings. All in all it feels as though the author had two seperate stories which he has shoehorned into each other because he needed a 300+ page book.
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