EmptySeraph
08-26-2016, 06:19 PM
More often than now I hear the refrain that always comes back like some sort of trenchant reverberation to crush my skull: ''I cannot read this book. It's too hard, too complex. I don't understand it. I don't get the point.'' Fair enough. You don't understand it. Perhaps you weren't meant to understand. But seriously, why do you put such an emphasis on understanding? Who says that you absolutely have to understand? Who says that a book has a certain message you must, under any circumstances, receive and perceive? Who, in the end, said the author owes you any explanation? I'm completely perplexed, dumbfound, smitten when I realise that some people imagine literature as some kind of dialogue in which the writer tells a story and the reader capturates the message and later deforms it with its own mind and conscience. It's the most lamentable and false definition of literature I've ever came across. I could keep going with this protest and explain it over and over again, but I think quoting Mallarmé suffices: Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
Now, it's time to reveal the true purpose of this thread, and to quote Mallarmé for a second time, the flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books. I want to read books, but I have none to choose from. I need recommendations. I need titles. However, not any kind of books. I'm thinking of those books that give people nightmares because of their intolerably complex architecture and unbreathable dense content. Books that seem to have been written in the dark, deep down bellow, where no beam of light could possibly enlighten their lines and make them more comprehensible. I'm looking after obscure books, after books that do not, at any cost, want to reveal their secret, to just give away their esence. Insanely cryptic books, in fact, hermetic books, books whose main purpose is, at last, not to be understood. Pay attention, I'm speaking about literature, about fiction, so to say. I want to find some books that resemble unending sesions of torment, that require extreme attention to even grasp their ideas, their nuances, their obsessions, their parfume...
Books akin to Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, you know, books that take some time, at least...
Any idea?
P.S.: I've already read the ones influenced by those named above, I'm quite acquainted with a fair share of post-modern literature...
Now, it's time to reveal the true purpose of this thread, and to quote Mallarmé for a second time, the flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books. I want to read books, but I have none to choose from. I need recommendations. I need titles. However, not any kind of books. I'm thinking of those books that give people nightmares because of their intolerably complex architecture and unbreathable dense content. Books that seem to have been written in the dark, deep down bellow, where no beam of light could possibly enlighten their lines and make them more comprehensible. I'm looking after obscure books, after books that do not, at any cost, want to reveal their secret, to just give away their esence. Insanely cryptic books, in fact, hermetic books, books whose main purpose is, at last, not to be understood. Pay attention, I'm speaking about literature, about fiction, so to say. I want to find some books that resemble unending sesions of torment, that require extreme attention to even grasp their ideas, their nuances, their obsessions, their parfume...
Books akin to Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, you know, books that take some time, at least...
Any idea?
P.S.: I've already read the ones influenced by those named above, I'm quite acquainted with a fair share of post-modern literature...