Disturbing books.

[waryan]

Thanks, for a while I tried to get ahold of that, I need to try a bit harder.

I suppose I am bored with literature and am looking for something so different that it might re-inspire me as to what writing can accomplish?

I like the idea of finding more books like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Abe's Kangaroo Notebook or Dante's Divine Comedy.

[TheFifthElement]

Well The Kangaroo Notebook is pretty out there!

Have you ever read anything by Haruki Murakami? If you like more obscure works I'd recommend Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World which is pretty surreal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-Bo...d_of_the_World

And if you like Joyce then I guess you don't mind wordy prose. Might be worth checking out something by Angela Carter, perhaps Heroes and Villains http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/2...-villains.html

or The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inf...Doctor_Hoffman

Richard Brautigan is a good recommendation too. I've read In Watermelon Sugar and Trout Fishing in America quite recently. I prefered Watermelon Sugar personally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Watermelon_Sugar

What about Time's Arrow by Martin Amis? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time's_Arrow_(novel)

Good luck with your search, and if you find anything interesting on the way let us know!

[Ashurbanipal]

Why not read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It is a very bizarre book.
Naked Lunch is always a classic option for anyone wanting bizarre and odd.

[waryan]

Thanks everyone, these are some great finds- Also I have Wind-Up Bird chronicles by Murikami and I start it but then something always gets in the way- and its funny because I was trying to decide between that one and Hard-Boiled when in the store, but I'll check out Chronicles and see where it takes me.

Thx again

[SirRaustusBear]

I second Trout Fishing in America and recommend Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar as well. People live in a town where most everything is made of watermelon sugar and the sun is a different color every day. Wednesday is black silent sun day in which there is no sound.

[stlukesguild]

Check out Joyce's "spiritual" father-figure, Lawrence Sterne. Fernando Pessoa blurs fiction and poetry. Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, Augusto Monterroso's Complete Works and other Stories, Gerard de Nerval's Selected Writings, Anne Carson's Red and Plainwater, Donald Barthleme's stories may all take you in the right direction.

[Niamh]

I've said it before and i'll say it again.
The Third Policeman by flann O' Brien. By far the weirdest book i've ever read.

[kelby_lake]

The Balcony by Jean Genet.

More than a bit disturbing.

[islandclimber]

Yeah Finnegan's Wake is definitely bizarre and if you don't care whether you understand it completely, it is an amazing read to just read right through the first time.. the second time though, you may want to get a companion volume explaining it, and spend months going through it, as the companion volume is generally longer than the book if it is a good one lol...


for disturbing bizarre (not for the faint of heart).. well there is a good list here...

The Marquis de Sade-- 120 days of Sodom
Georges Bataille-- story of the eye
Octave Mirbeau-- the torture garden
Donoso -- The Obscene Bird of Night
Lautreamont-- Maldoror

I don't know how I managed to finish a few of these, but just thinking about what I read in them makes me feel sick...

for not so disturbing, yet still somewhat bizarre,

Beckett
some Kafka
Nabokov's --- Invitation to a Beheading
Calvino
Jean Genet-- The Balcony
much of Borges


Etienne's list is quite good..

[Jozanny]

I've said it before and i'll say it again.
The Third Policeman by flann O' Brien. By far the weirdest book i've ever read.

And I will agree with Niamh again that The Third Policeman defies the more typical Menippean forms we have come to treat as classics, like Gulliver's Travels, which it bears some affinity to, but I do not think it is *spaced out* literature as such. Its coy playfulness has its own kind of odd coherence.

If I had to choose something bizarre, it would not be Tristram Shandy either, as luke suggests. Sterne is one of a kind, but what he actually does in Shandy, is deconstruct the novel's traditional framework. It is not freaky so much as delayed climax and frustration, a story which unravels itself.

My pick, oddly enough, would be Clive Barker's speculative fiction. Not because it is gross, or graphic, so much as strange, and something not entirely understood by me. He is not a tiresome panderer the way more commercial authors like King or Rice can be, but he isn't altogether easy to pin down, and as a reader I felt uneasy with the themes he seemed to be pushing.

I don't generally read works which are too weird, but some years ago I made the mistake of picking up a Charlee Jacob paperback, and if you like punk horror, she can probably turn your stomach. She isn't much of an original, actually, but disgusting, yes.

[JBI]

Try Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King; that work uses blends of post-modernism and traditional Native American techniques to a bizarre, yet highly original effect.

[pgwodehousefan]

Der Sandmann (forgot the author) Clockwork Orange

[SleepyWitch]

Der Sandmann (forgot the author) Clockwork Orange

E.T. A. Hoffmann

[bounty]

it's been awhile but i remember the douglas adam's hitchhiker books being pretty out there. i could be wrong. i am confident however that kafka's metamorphosis was a doozie!

[Etienne]

I'm adding Raymond Roussel books. I'm almost done with Impressions from Africa (nothing to do with a travel book, by the way), and that is very weird.