When I was in high school and fully submerged in my angsty adolescent phase (that still hasn’t quite worn off), I took to carting around shockingly weird, very adult books to show how hip and edgy and literary I was. Heh.
Sure, the teachers could make us read A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby during summer vacation, but you better believe that from August until May, I’d have A Clockwork Orange, Jim Carroll’s poetry, or anything by William S. Burroughs (or the other Beats) tucked under my arm for the trek between classes. (My aunt gave me a copy of Naked Lunch for Christmas my senior year after my mom told her that’s the novel I’d been hinting at wanting to read next. I don’t think either of them had ever read it or else they probably wouldn’t have let it come within a hundred feet of my impressionable eyes.)
Here I am several years later (I won’t say how many) and I still remember being quite weirded out by the grotesque imagery in Naked Lunch. Plus I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what that book is about … except Mugwumps. Yep. Boy, do I remember the Mugwumps. I suppose a re-reading is in order to see if the weirdness still stands.
Anyway, my point is, the weirdness of that novel has stuck with me all these years. Up until this past winter, I’m pretty sure that was the weirdest book I’d ever read. That was prior to my encounter with The White Hotel, a novel by D.M. Thomas recommended to me by a friend.
The White Hotel is one of the most interesting, depressing, randy, confounding books I’ve ever read. It features several narrative forms, and includes erotic surrealist poetry, clinical letter correspondence, straight-up fantasy narrative, and a depressingly authentic Holocaust story arc. So much about it is so ridiculous, yet so much about it is so amazingly profound. And quite beautifully written. It’s a complex book.
And it’s weird.
So what’s the weirdest book you’ve ever read?
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Responses to “What’s the strangest book you’ve ever read?”
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
the strangest books i’ve ever read match up shockingly closely to my favorite books - i mean, being deliberately “avant” or “shocking” is no substitute for quality, but when it’s done well, isn’t that what we look for in literature or art or whatever in general…something that turns the conventions of what we’re used to experiencing on its ear a little? that being said, in order of strangeness:
house of leaves - mark z. danielewski
infinite jest - david foster wallace
the atrocity exhibition - j.g. ballard
May 24th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Watt by Samuel Beckett.
Watt tries to figure out what’s what about Nott’s not-not.
May 24th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Oh, and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. It was avant-garde in the infancy of the novel, and remains avant-garde 250 years after its initial publication. It has a blank white page and invites the reader to draw a portrait of one of the characters “as far from your wife or as close to your mistress” as possible and a black page to mourn the loss of another character - in 1759!
May 24th, 2008 at 9:39 am
In the days of teenage angst and intellectualism, i used to go around with a copy of Comte Lautremont’s “Maldoror” under my arm. another good one is Andre Breton’s “Nadja.” The French seem to excel at strange books. And don’t forget “The Dream Life of Belso Snell” (Nathaniel West), which is actually unreadable, unlike his supremely creepy “Miss Lonelyhearts.”
May 24th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
“Noir,” by K.W. Jeter
Science fiction/detective story in which the protagonist has installed in his brain’s optical center a filter so that his world is perceived as a film noir/Raymond Chandler novel.
It has some really creepy subplots.
For example, people who die in debt are kept alive, but various parts of their body — whatever’s left — are submitted for organ transplant, and they must work the rest of their undead lives to pay off their debt. Such people are known as “in-dead-ted.” I think that’s how Jeter spelled it.
Another weird subplot involved the grisly punishment meted out to people to infringed on author/creators’ copyrights. I mean GRISLY.
And then Jeter goes off the deep end.
Definitely worth a read, if you haven’t already.
“Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer,” by Neal Stephenson
Another sci-fi piece, positing a future in which books can become interactive teachers and the world is not divided into nations so much as it is divided into clans/tribes such as the Victorians — who dress and act accordingly.
“Hopscotch,” by Julio Cortazar.
I encountered this Colombian writer’s work in college, and fell in love. You can read the chapters from front to back, from back to front, or any random order you want. He does have a suggested non-linear order. It involves South American leftists in France and a kidnapping, but the form is why it’s strange, not the content, so much.
So, those are the strangest books I’ve ever read.
I’ve got a question for you: Have you ever read “War and Peace”? I was listening to On The Media this morning, and there were all these people, including the reporter, who hadn’t done so. I read it in high school (the Modern Library edition) and loved it, and can’t imagine why anybody thinks it’s not worth it. It’s one of those books you actually finish, and think, “God, I wish it would go on!” I’m thinking of re-reading it.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Oooh, these are all excellent. Thanks for chiming in, because, even though I didn’t make it clear in the original post, this was just a shameless way for me to add books to my to-read list. Mwaa haha!
May 28th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Ah, the Diamond Age. I will always remember running with scissors lumped in with pogroms and disease as one of the scourges of mankind.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
“Typee” by Herman Melville. Halfway through, I forgot it was a novel and started thinking of it as memoir. It’s nuts.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:51 am
If we’re going back into classic American lit, we have to go back to Charles Brockten Brown, sometimes called the first American novelist, and his very weird, creepy, perverse books “Wieland; or, the Transformation” (1798) and “Edgar Huntly; or, Mempoirs of a Sleep-Walker” (1799). Spontaneous combustion, anyone?
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