Solo - Softcover

Dasgupta, Rana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554689848 ISBN 13: 9781554689842

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2014

Synopsis

Winner of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, Solo is a devastating and rapturous novel about the life and daydreams of Ulrich, a reclusive one-hundred-year-old man from Bulgaria

Before Ulrich lost his sight, he read a magazine story about parrots. A group of explorers had come upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by this discovery, the explorers put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.

Now one hundred years of age, Ulrich wonders if he, unlike these hapless birds, has any wisdom left to leave the world. He embarks on an epic armchair journey of remembrance and imagination—through the turbulent century that marked his country, Bulgaria, and through his own lifetime of lost love and thwarted ambitions.

Intertwining science and music, the Old World and the New, the real and the imagined, Solo is an outstanding novel by a remarkable fabulist, a writer of prodigious talent.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Solo is a wonder an exploration of memory, a window on a country and region mysterious to the West even in the twentieth century, a keen study of human love and failure. Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian
With imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century through the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in this remarkable and dazzling debut novel.
In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer. His passion for chemistry leads him to Berlin, but his studies are cut short when he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence. Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, Solo is a virtuoso work.
A novel utterly refreshing in its blunt acknowledgment that thoroughgoing realism involves escaping reality as much as constructing it . . . What makes Mr. Dasgupta s adventurous storytelling especially rewarding is the way he carefully integrates tiny details from Ulrich s drab life into his fantasy, transfiguring them like hay spun into gold . . . Invigorating. Wall Street Journal
Rana Dasgupta was born in England. His debut collection, Tokyo Cancelled, was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; he won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Solo. Having lived in France, Malaysia, and the United States, he now makes his home in Delhi.

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From the Inside Flap:

With imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century through the story of a hundred-yearold blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that confirms the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction. 

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams — and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence. 

Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, the real and the imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1554689848
• ISBN 13: 9781554689842
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368