I agree about Kafka...just bizarre stuff.
I agree about Kafka...just bizarre stuff.
[The weird books you've been mentioning that I've read I love them all. What does that tell about me, I wonder? And though I've never read Finnegan's Wake I'm sure it's the weirdest ever]
Good weird: anything by Daniil Kharms / Kafka / Ernst Jandl
Bad weird: is there such thing?
Don't-know-what-to-make-of-it weird: anything by Gertrude Stein
Years ago, I read this book called "How to Disapear Completely and Never Be Found" by Doug Richmond. It was really strange, but it still kept my attention. It was about this girl and her friend and a rat-man who writes comic books.
"Slaughterhouse-five" by Kurt Vonnegut was also really wierd, but also really good. I love the pictures drawn throughout.
Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille
I read it a while ago so my memory is a little hazy, but essentially it is about these two teenagers who have very strange sex, involving eggs and milk and urine. Everyone is insane. After some girl kills herself they go to Spain. More weird sex (this time with a bull's testicles). They rape a priest and pluck out his eye. The end.
Yeah , I'd go for the so-called Nova trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.Originally Posted by Trystan
Burroughs had fully developed his cutting-up and folding-in techniques by then, to which Naked Lunch stands as a precursor. And on that note, Brion Gysin's The Process. Oh, and Der Prozess (The Trial) by Kafka. On a roll...
Someone mentioned Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman. His At Swim Two Birds is the strangest thing I've read. And it's hilarious. But it helps if you drink Guinness while you read. Borges is bizarre in a magical way. Pirandello's Six Characters... is in the same vein as At Swim To Birds. Crying of Lot 49 was nicely weird, also.
The short stories of R. A. Lafferty.
The most bizarre book ever has to be "Naked Lunch". Then, Jose Saramago's Blindness and everything by Haruki Murakami are also quite bizarre/disturbing
The Bridge
Walking on Glass
both by Iain Banks.
Fabulous, but very trippy
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
- Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
Tupelo, I hope you have read The Wasp Factory by the same author. It's brilliant. I mentionned it on the same thread earlier this year.
http://www.online-literature.com/for...761#post664761
...As a moth mistakes a bulb
for the moon, and goes to hell...
-Tom Waits-
Of course!
I loved The Wasp Factory. Also Dead Air and Espedair Street, although it's a good while since I've read any of them. I may give them another look.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
- Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
Well, it's a 'low-budgety' translation of a Japanese pulp novel that became a famous movie--so the prose is fine, but just basically functional (fast-moving and intelligently assembled plot, though). HOWEVER, on every other criteria, Battle Royale by Koushun Takami fits the bill perfectly.
Probably the weirdest - and also the bleakest - fiction I have read is Jonathan Bowden's disorientating novel Kratos. The latter deals with insanity from a Nietzschean perspective.
And at the very high end of the scale, particularly with regard to literary skill, is Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. The novel reads like a completely misanthropic Hermann Meville, but what makes the it unusual is its very multilayered construction and the sheer baroqueness and density of the prose. Really extraordinary.
I'm reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest next. I've read the first chapter. Insane asylum in the early days when "professionals" got it all wrong. Seems pretty disturbing so far, they over-shocked this one guy and now he's a vegetable.
I've read Kafka's Metamorphasis. It was obviously notoriously pretty bizzare. VERY open to interpretation.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
Sounds very interesting. I added these two on my list. Thanks Xylophanous!Probably the weirdest - and also the bleakest - fiction I have read is Jonathan Bowden's disorientating novel Kratos. The latter deals with insanity from a Nietzschean perspective.
And at the very high end of the scale, particularly with regard to literary skill, is Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. The novel reads like a completely misanthropic Hermann Meville, but what makes the it unusual is its very multilayered construction and the sheer baroqueness and density of the prose. Really extraordinary.
...As a moth mistakes a bulb
for the moon, and goes to hell...
-Tom Waits-
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