Anyway in the meantime I just started Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren. I did read the first few pages of one of his few non-sci-fi fiction books Hogg and I could tell right from the start it was going to be an unpleasantly tedious read. I suppose I'll go back and finish that and read every attempt the book will make to shock and see if there's anything more to it, just to say that I did, but I doubt it. Anyway, Dhalgren: described everywhere as an indecipherable book, William Gibson called it "a riddle never meant to be solved." The concept, a Midwest city where strange things happen for some unexplained reason, people move out, gangs take over, strange things continue to happen, while we follow around the main character and his experiences in about 800 pages worth of material. I don't know what to expect, but I really liked William Gibson's foreword of the book. He says he doesn't fully understand it, but tries to describe it the best he can in the context of the time it was written, about some "singularity" that happened in America, that some noticed, some didn't, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, about strange things that happened and disappeared, that most people didn't see, but it all affected everyone, and the book is... some... affirmation of that I guess?
Well I will say it pulls a Finnegans Wake with the first sentence of the book being a continuation of its last sentence, so I am not expecting something conventional. However the first few pages describe some chintzy sex scene between the main character and some Asian woman, then some cryptic dialogue is exchanged, which I don't know whether to say if it's mysterious or just badly written. If this was filmed dialogue I can easily see it coming off as really terrible. Maybe it'll make more sense later on, it is a circular narrative after all. Then he enters a cave with some prisms. I was very tired reading it so I don't exactly what's going on. I do intend to go back to see if it gets better from there. All I know is the number of pages of Delany material I've read so far remains in the single digits and despite some interesting description I'm finding some elements of his writing cringe-worthy already, though this book does hold a lot more promise than Hogg that's for certain, and does feel unfair to judge so early. But, outside that strange sentence tying in with the book's ending sentence, not a great start for me.
Post edited September 02, 2013 by cannard