the last man in the world
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the last man in the world
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath, by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is a former denizen of my adopted state, 'Lil Rhody. That is the weirdest damn thing I ever read. I don't know anyone else besides me that actually liked it, except my son, but he is a total weirdo like his old man.
-plh
The wierdest piece of literature so far would be the Cask of Amon Tillado by Poe. I don't necessarily like Poe, but I made the efforts to read it.
If you read more of Lovecraft's work, you will find things that make seem as commonplace as it really is.Quote:
Originally Posted by plh
A play rather than a book : Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett:D freaked me out...by its absurdness if that is a word!
no. you have no conceptualization of wierd. i can't get over this guy. he freaks me out. this is a direct quote from "The Riddle of the Traveling Skull" by Harry Stephen Keeler. the chapter that this is out of is called "A Chinaman He Catch Himse'f a Light!":
It must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney talking Englishman with the long-beaked Sherlock-Holmesian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, exconvict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of - in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel - or Suing Sophie!
its a mystery novel. yes, he is published
The Temptation of Saint-Anthony by Flaubert
Ulysses by James Joyce. In the same vein, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, technically the prequel to Ulysses. Dubliners was kind of strange, too.
Maybe they're not exactly "weird", but are most definately difficult to follow.
I'm not sure what Joyce was smoking.
Of course, if he had written Ulysses in a normal style, it might be pretty boring. A man wakes up, eats breakfast, goes to work, takes a lunch break, wanders around the streets of Dublin for a while, plays with himself on the beach (yeah, it's what you're thinking), and goes home. And those are the highlights as I remember them. It's been a few years since I've read it.
To be honest... Peter Pan.
I liked it, but it was so strange.
"The Breast" by Philip Roth, we read it in the third year in the Modern American Literature class in my university. Really fun, but realy weird, at the same time...
I thought the Son of the Circus, by Irving was pretty werid when I read it. It sticks out in my mind as the strangest thing I have ever read.
Also everything I have read by Tom Robbins has been completely bazzar but in a good way, I love his work, but it certaintly is strange.
Oh I just remembered one book... La disparition by George Perec, the whole book (around 400 pages I believe) doesn't contain a single "e", and, in french, it's an even more common letter than in english. It gives the whole thing a very strange feeling, that's for sure.
Ferdydurke by Gombrowicz is also rather strange and so are many Boris Vian books.
I thought Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed was pretty wierd. Acctually, it just made me feel more uncomfortable than anything.
Oh, I'm reading that right now. I haven't gotten all that far yet but I'll certainly agree it's odd.Quote:
Originally Posted by blackbird_9
It's not a book, but the short story Young Goodman Brown by Hawthorne comes the closest for me. It's very cryptic and leaves you with so many questions.
Here's the basic story - A young married man travels deep into the forest at night to join a secret satanic cult, or does he?
A lovely junky fairy-tale. I loved it when I was younger. :D He gives them "magic dust" which "makes them fly"... :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by Zelly
To respond to the actual question myself, it was probably Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author or, no matter how stereotypical it might sound, Kafka's The Trial.
I vaguely recall some other weird books, some of which I read when I was a child, but I cannot remember anything concrete (characters, name of book or author), it is just excerpts and weird feeling I got.
Kafka on the Shore Haruki Murakami
A close second would be
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
Falling Angel, definitely, with Shutter Island a close second. Both of them, you get to the end and think, what did I just read? Sort of the same effect as The Usual Suspects.
Steppenwolf had to be written when the author was on some sort of drugs...
I'm about to start Shutter Island.Quote:
Originally Posted by docwill
Finished it a few days ago, I don't think it was so strange.Quote:
Originally Posted by 1967Impala
I found Metamorphosis and even The Castle weirder than The Trial. The weirdest book that I have ever read has to be Comte de Lautreamont's Songs of Maldoror:Quote:
Originally Posted by Anastasija
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Maldoror-Poe...9550462&sr=8-1
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a book I found rather weird.
We had to study it last year for Year 11 English. I liked it, however the fact it was written from the point of view of a suspected schizophrenic made some of the passages really strange.
Miss America by Suzanne Phillips
Not "weird", just very distrubing...
Not one to read when you're ill.
The weirdest book I've read so far was Alice in Wonderland. I think I had the basic idea and when I went to read the full out novel...as surprised. Good surprsied though.
I'm casting my vote for Ulysses, too. I can't believe I muddled through 700+ pages, most of the time with only a faint idea of what was going on. Still, the last section somehow made things well worth it. It all sort of came together in a weird way. I guess rereading it and knowing what was going on the whole time would be fun, right?
for me, it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I know it's a really popular book, but I'm more of a straightforward story kind of guy, so I was constantly trying to figure out if there was something I just wasn't getting. anyway, maybe i'll read it again sometime...
I take it that 'weird' can be meant in a good sense?
Every play and novel by Beckett I have read, every story by Kafka I have read, and "Crime and Punishment". I love all of these, especially "CaP". This last one had the weirdest scenes, really powerful stuff too. Petrovich's interrogation of Raskolnikov, in a sarcastic and almost hateful tone, is weird and sublime.
The Naked Lunch
And Finnegan's Wake, although I never got through more than 5 pages.
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro was very strange to me.
The atmosphere in that book was so eerie it was ridiculous.
Also any of the Chuck Palahniuk novels are quite strange.
I gotta say anything by Richard Brautigan. In Watermelon Sugar is about a town where everything is made of Watermelon Sugar. Trout Fishing in America was quite strange as well as the title of the book is both a passtime and the name of a character.
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
Ok, so it's not as weird as lovecraft, poe, or joyce...but it's the weirdest thing I've read that was written in the last ten years.
i was going to come in here and write that one. so great.Quote:
Originally Posted by linz
Anything by Kafka, really...and Ulysses by James Joyce
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. Definitely not as wierd as some books out there, but <sarcasm>as I have an odd, inexplicable attraction to books that are halfway normal</sarcasm> I thought it was pretty strange.
:)
House of Leaves by Danielewski. Every time "house" is printed, it's blue. It's about a guy who one day discovers his house is bigger on the inside than on the outside--literally. It gets pretty scary and strange. Go into a bookstore and flip through this book. It's hardly a traditional novel--text goes everywhere on the page, and sometimes you only read one line through the middle of the page, sometimes only one corner. Really and truly used the "novel" medium to it's fullest potential. Bizarre and enthralling.
I have to say one called Geek Love. It is one of the most bizarre books that I've ever read. It made me really uncomfortable, but I still couldn't stop reading. You know that car wreck that you just can't look away from? That is sort of what Geek Love is like. It is pretty well written, but the plot is disconcerting.
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
It may seem an odd choice, but Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais what came after him could hardly be called a movement as he already moved it.