A fever dream of the last century seen through the eyes of a 100-year-old Bulgarian man
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting.

People you know, yet can’t quite name,” wrote Philip Larkin.

Solo, Rana Dasgupta’s new novel, is like a fever dream of the last century seen through the ageing eyes of Ulrich, a Bulgarian man looking back on a hundred years of high historical drama and a no less eventful inner life.

Bulgaria, in the interstices of Asia and Europe, is gripped by a giddy sense of possibility in the 1900s — Ulrich’s father, a railway engineer, sees his work as a philosophical calling, dreaming of the planet “wrapped in twin lines of steel and given over, finally, to science and understanding”. He instructs a terrified peasant woman not to look at the poppies outside her window “for they race more rapidly than your senses can apprehend. Look instead at the church spires and mountains in the distance, whose movements are more steady. For this is the vision of our new times, we have been liberated from the myopia that kept human being peering at our own miserable patch of earth.... From now on, they shall see far, and look upon a common future!”

Competing visions of the common future, of course, tore the country apart and Ulrich’s story meekly follows his times. His obsession with the violin, his later consuming love for chemistry are thwarted by circumstances, and he quietly submits. He lets life grow over his traumas, covering them smoothly like they never were. There are some moments when Ulrich unravels, like when his wife leaves him for another man, parting him from his baby son, and when his politically minded mother is briefly taken away to a concentration camp. But, for the most part, he adjusts to the rolling of political seasons in Bulgaria, working in a no-name chemical factory, even telling on his beloved supervisor and briefly featuring as an “ordinary hero” on Radio Sofia for installing a new reactor. Later, when the country is dismantled and recomposed again, and shrines to Ronald Reagan are being put up, Ulrich realises that he has lived too long, seen statues pulled down too many times, that the “human frame could not hold up if the world was destroyed too many times and remade again”. Is his own life a failure? What could once have been answered with an easy “Yes” now confounds him. He “does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail.... A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water”. And what constitutes Ulrich’s life anyway? Is it to be measured by the bare biographical signposts, people encountered and experiences piled up, or is it also what took up the greatest portion of his spirit, the “private fictions that sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense”?

... contd.