Book Review | Solo

The blurb for this book quotes Salman Rushdie, who describes it as ‘a novel of exceptional strangeness’. Coming from a master of magical realism, the remark is quite something, and the novel is certainly strange, and quite often bizarre. It is strange in more ways than one.

For starters, the way the novel is constructed is not exactly conventional. Here we have a book divided into two movements which can be read as if they are two novels only tangentially linked together.

It is also curious that Rana Dasgupta, a British-Indian born in Canterbury to a Bengali father and British mother, educated at Cambridge and Oxford and in the US, who lives in India, chooses to write in great detail about the vicissitudes of life in 20th century Bulgaria, and later in Georgia and in the US in the 21st century.

At this point, one has to ask whether cultural identity as we know it has not lost its significance. Authors are opening out of geographical confines. Is this the result of globalisation, resulting from mass migrations and rapid technological change? According to French critic Nicolas Bourriad – who curated the Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain – we have moved from post-modernism to what he calls ‘altermodernism’, where artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture.

In this novel, the author shows how his imagination has been influenced by cross-cultures to create a global view of the shifting narratives of our times.

Having said that, I hope this preamble will not put off prospective readers, for despite subject and style, or perhaps because of that, Solo makes a splendidly original read.

The novel has a large sweep that speaks of the past and the future. In the first part, entitled ‘Life’, it deals with the life of a nearly 100-year-old man living mostly in Sofia, starting from the time when Bulgaria was emerging from the influence of the Ottoman Empire to embrace Western Europe, soon to go through a centralised socialist past and eventually moving to a deregulated capitalist present.

Ulrich, the protagonist, who abandons his passion for music and for chemistry, and eventually becomes blind, lives through terrible times ‘when the ones who smiled were the dead, glad to be at rest’.

In the second movement, ‘Daydreams’, we see a leap from a lived life to a life imagined.  Losing his eyesight, Ulrich’s gaze turns inwards, and other characters come to life when the action shifts to post-communist Georgia, and later to New York. The author evokes a world of celebrity and violence.

It is a teeming, chaotic, surreal world, full of vibrant cacophony, sensuous and deadly violent in turn. One is reminded of the great films by the Serbian director Emir Kusturica.

Music plays an important role in the novel. The author acknowledges his interest in the rich heritage of Bulgarian music with its mixture of Arabic, Serbian, Gypsy, Greek and Folk, all banned during communist times except for sanctioned classical music and new versions of Bulgarian folk music.

Unsurprisingly, both Ulrich and his father had dreams about playing the violin which did not materialise. Perhaps this accounts for the title Solo, which reminds me of a quote by the British author Samuel Butler: “Life is like playing a violin solo in public, and learning the instrument as one goes on”.

Readers might be perplexed by the characters that appear in the second part of the book, which can only tie up with the first part if they are seen as forming part of the dream-life that Ulrich creates in response to the disasters of his squalid reality.

When, at the end of the novel, he also surfaces in America and meets his long dead first love, he admits that this is a dream. But dreams are vital, for this is where one stores away the surplus of an unlived life.

Some of the best contemporary fiction written in English has come from India, but Dasgupta refuses to be tied down by ethnic considerations laid down by geography.

Some readers might find the structure of the novel annoying and his style mannered, but many others will find it an exhilarating read which shows the mastery and originality of this brilliant young novelist who won the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2010.