What's the wierdest fiction book you've ever read?

[zhao]

Creation stories (of universe and humankind) are about as common as dirt once a person begins to look into comparative mythologies and folklore.

massive personal investment in this topic.

watch out for me science vs. religion post on the same river! sure to turn a few heads (and/or stomachs!)

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

Definitely. Although I always found The Third Policeman to be just that little bit odder.

I've always wondered what people who haven't spent time in Ireland make of Flann O'Brien. His particular strain of surreal / absurd / gently mocking humour resonates of late night drunken conversations in a certain type of Dublin pub to such an extent that I wonder how much more bizarre it is to people who haven't experienced that. Similarly, if you weren't regaled with legends of the Fianna by cultural nationalist Irish primary school teachers does the image of Fionn mac Cumhaill running through a field with a brace of cattle secreted in his hempen drawers have quite the same parodic Jingoism-deflating effect?

A nationalist Irish secondary school teacher I went out with for a while (best days of ma sorry life) sold Flann O'Brien to me, I still have a copy of The Poor Mouth from her. Love that stuff, and I've only been to Ireland for a few days, and that was years after reading it. I have the complete myles as well, which has passages of genius.

 

[jenks]

Not necessarily the oddest (i've just driven back from France and need a proper think) but certainly one worthy of mention here.

Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String

http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/ageofwir.html

btw in total awe of all Flann O'Brien's work, agree about Pale Fire and Barthelme

What about Lost in the Funhouse by Barth (huge influence on all those Eggars, DFW writers)?

 

[craner]

Eden, Eden, Eden

 

[aragorn23]

'Cyber Positive' by something called the Orphan Drift collective was pretty damn strange....a cut-up mix of freeform rambling about drum n bass, virtuality and voodoo, interspersed with passages from authors like Deleuze and Guattari, Manuel De Landa, Nick Land, some beat sounding stuff....Every now and then the text breaks down into streams of binary.

Also, 'Eidostectonic, the Architectonic of the Conceptual Ideographic Organon' by Israel Idalovichi and Asaf Friedman is bloody surreal....it seems to be some sort of neo-Derridean attempt at creating a visual language using Hebrew characters and all sorts of almost random associations....then again it could be a book on 5 dimensional tetris....very peculiar. Kind of like Crowley's '777' turned into a post-structuralist picture book.

Waffle!

Oh, and that was my first post. Stumbled across this board and must say it looks like a jolly good place for a chat!

 

[jed_]

Eventually, the reader can surmise that Kinbote is insane and fixated on the writer Shade and is almost certainly responsible for the poet's death.

My problem with "Pale Fire" is that, actually, that stuff is evident straight off the bat and, once you realise this (it takes about 3 pages), the book has nowhere to go. the poem itself is very good, though.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

'The Inflatable Volunteer' by Steve Aylett is magnificent nonsense. All his books are worth a read, but this one just rolls along like a pimped out combine harvester.

"That evening I stood holding to my belly a round mirror, ground and kept in the dark for this day. I'd bought another one from the Shop o' Fury and Eddie swivelled this toward me to create a descending regression of images. Eddie peered at my midsection, squinting. 'I can see through a hole into another concern.'
'What do you see?'
'Weeds'
'Are you sure?'
'As sure as I can be.'
'What else?'
'Eleventh-hour negotiations with a master chef.'
'Any other people?'
'Some U-boat captain in a polo-neck jumper.'
'That all?'
'I can see the boring mischief of fez-wearing spider monkey in a Persian bazaar.'
'And?'
'A mirrorshaded and strenuously enigmatic chopper pilot.'
'Nothing more?'
'No, that's it.'"
"

Exquisite daftness.

 

[don_quixote]

my first mindfuck book was paul auster - new york trilogy, but i can't imagine it'd be that effective now i've been numbed a bit, but at the time i read it i was just what thefuck what the fuck this is amazing!

talking of bs johnson i read albert angelo last week and i really liked it

 

[don_quixote]

oh and when i first read borges too i found him so exhausting so i was glad it was short stories.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

You Bright and Risen Angels by William T Vollman, who has recently published a multi volume treatise on violence called Rising up and Rising Down, is very odd. The passage describing a super-fecund forest grabbing passing boats is astonishing. I might transcribe a little later.

 

[mistersloane]

'Cyber Positive' by something called the Orphan Drift collective was pretty damn strange....a cut-up mix of freeform rambling about drum n bass, virtuality and voodoo, interspersed with passages from authors like Deleuze and Guattari, Manuel De Landa, Nick Land, some beat sounding stuff....Every now and then the text breaks down into streams of binary.

Also, 'Eidostectonic, the Architectonic of the Conceptual Ideographic Organon' by Israel Idalovichi and Asaf Friedman is bloody surreal....it seems to be some sort of neo-Derridean attempt at creating a visual language using Hebrew characters and all sorts of almost random associations....then again it could be a book on 5 dimensional tetris....very peculiar. Kind of like Crowley's '777' turned into a post-structuralist picture book.

Waffle!

Oh, and that was my first post. Stumbled across this board and must say it looks like a jolly good place for a chat!

Allo m8! You managed to get 'architectonic' in yer first post! I remember hearing about that word and thinking, oh for christ's sake. Orphan Drift did a pretty good short film a few years back. I just wish they were funkier.

Flann O'Brien really turned me on when I was young, aside from Finnegan's Wake, it was the first time I was just 'what the fuck'.
The first book that really blew my mind was Ulysses though. I'd bought FW and thought, oh man, I can't so then stepped into that. I read it in a self-contained apartment with a 40 year old gentleman called Graham in Gran Canaria, just after my mum died. He was furious at me cos all I wanted to do was stay indoors and read it. He brought along half a ping-pong ball to use as a plug for the sink, he always travelled with it just in case.
Ingenious, I thought at the time.