Any book from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe series.
Any book from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe series.
The Gormenghast Trilogy - Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone - by Mervyn Peake.
'bizarre' hey - how about Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, it's a short story so you can read it one sitting - probably intensify the 'bizarre' experience. Do you mean 'bizarre' in the Absurdist sense?
We can never know what to want, because living only one life we can neither compare it with our previous lives, nor perfect it in our lives to come'
Milan Kundera,The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Parce que c'est toi, parce que c'est moi
Yet another opportunity to recommend Kathy Acker, especially Blood and Guts in Highschool and Great Expectations, brilliant, unique, hilarious books both and dear to my heart. Perhaps one day someone here will actually take up one of these recommendations and read one of them.
Acker wrote without rewrites and professed herself uninterested in character or narrative, but said, 'I had an interest in copying'. The hype (partly her own) had her as a plagiarist, but there's very little verbatim copying in her books, more a series of, often deceptively simple, descriptions of works by everyone from Catullus to Hawthorne, woven, with apparent recklessness, into disjointed tales of women in vaguely punky, artistic urban milieus, usually wildly frustrated by everything from dominant political systems to lovelessness to what was supposed to constitute the acceptable place of the intellectual in society. Anomalies are everywhere: Jimmy Carter turns up in a New York punk club and picks up Janey, the heroine of Blood and Guts, beginning an abusive relationship with her. Someone purporting to be Erica Jong appears suddenly and delivers a frantic monologue ('My name is Erica Jong. I'm tearing up my clothes. Goodnight.') Janey is kidnapped by a Persian slavetrader who loves Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre and locks her in a room with nothing but The Scarlet Letter and a pencil.
Hi Etienne. I was surprised your first post left out Roussel, given your other choices. His book Locus Solus is also deeply weird.
A few anecdotes about Roussel: he only wrote Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus to draw attention to his first novel, which he considered his masterpiece. During the writing of it, he felt himself possessed by a sort of brilliant inspiration he called la gloire (the glory) and believed it to cause him to emanate such a bright light that he had to write during the day with the blinds of his windows down so as to save people passing in the street from being blinded. A guy I know who's a big fan of Roussel has read this book and he says it isn't any good at all.
In addition to his novels, Roussel wrote a book of short prose poems with a similar title to Impressions of Africa, each one following a rigid structure incorporating a series of bracketted information within other bracketted information. These kinds of formal experiment were one reason why he was important to the Oulipo writers.
A huge inspiration to surrealist figures such as Duchamp, Roussel was once asked what he thought of the movement and replied that he found them 'un peut obscur' (a bit obscure). This from a man who's books largely consisted of descriptions of strange, impossible machines.
In a similar vein, also look up Alfred Jarry's Ubu plays.
One of my faves!!Originally Posted by islandclimber
I have just thought of another bizarre collection: stories by Maupassant that are among the weirdest I've ever read and that aren't well-known at all, even among francophones. In fact, I have yet to meet someone else who's read them. I think they are all published together, but am not sure of the name of the collection - maybe Contes fantastiques.
And you've got Hoffmann's tales as well, some of which could be said to be bizarre, or at least uncanny (Freud spoke about them a lot). I loved them all, especially the Opinions of Murr the Cat. So funny!!
Three very different, bizarre books:
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem: A young man with Tourette's Syndrome, working for a private detective agency.
Sway, Zachary Lazar: The underside of the summer of love. Story runs through the 1960's.
Divisidero, Michael Ondaatje: (author of "The English Patient")
I just finished this book yesterday. I hope someone else reads it, so they can explain the ending to me?
man, jean genet...
yuck.
on topic:
gravity's rainbow- thomas pynchon \m/
That's because I've just finished Impressions of Africa - my first book by Roussel.
EDIT: Oh I was under the impression that I had put Flaubert's Temptation of St-Anthony in my first post, seems like I didn't. That's a good one for the topic.
Et l'unique cordeau des trompettes marines
Apollinaire, Le chantre
Sorry, I didn't word that very well. Just meant it made sense when you finally did mention him.
Another thread made me think of the following book:
Le rivage des Syrtes, by Julien Gracq.
I think it deserves to be called bizarre... it's bewitchingly beautiful, but nothing ever happens. Like a poetic Waiting for Godot.
Maybe you could try Vellum (The Book of all Hours) by Hal Duncan. It certainly is strange. He just published the second one and it's called Ink. Imagine a bizzarre mixture of sci-fi, fantasy, road trip and stream of conciousness. I found it quite fascinating.
My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith, 1931
You mean bizarre as in hilariously absurd? http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8926...ncidences.html This is priceless stuff. Check out also "The Diary of a Mad Man", by Gogol, funniest thing I've ever read. And like JBI said, Beckett seems to be your man. The Triology, Murphy, any of his plays, you name it.
I guess Ulysses can be called bizarre. Try Gertrude Stein if you're into playful-sounding automatic writing.
As for something more conventional, maybe D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. Not really bizarre, I know, but the dialogues are everything but normal, so...
If you can read German, Jandl seems to be the obvious choice: http://poetry.mystiek.net/jandl.htm
Hope this'll help you!
Last edited by kandaurov; 12-11-2008 at 07:03 AM. Reason: oh, that's classified.
(Has this not been mentioned yet?)
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs (actually - any of his cut-ups). Not particularly easy or conventional reading even for "hands-down bizarre", but I found it worthwile. It's both hilarious and repulsive.
Oh, oh, and Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. Scatological and sexually bizarre. Just like Trystan's recommendation: both hilarious and repulsive. I'd only clarify that there's a causal relation: it's because it's so repulsive that it's so hilarious.
Since Haruki Murakami has already been mentioned, how about Ryu Murakami? Coin Locker Babies is one of the most disturbing, potentially stomach-turning books I've ever read. I'm not even sure I liked it, I just had to keep reading it in an "OMG is this really happening?" sort of way.
Personally I also found Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum to be very strange, but I don't know how bizarre it actually is-- I think it just freaked me out personally because I really was not expecting it. It was extremely memorable though.
Sterlingthegraphicnovel.com
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