Experimental Books that are also good

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah that's the one, tainted love. Really good. I was properly obsessed with Michael X for a while, wanted to make a film about him. I thought he was the key to the 60s.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
You lent me that didn't you?


Both very weird books. I enjoyed them a lot, kinda like William Burroughs via Oolipo I feel, very weird but also playful and fun at times. Wouldn't claim to have understood them though.

Yeah, I did. You remember it much? Going to have to dig them all out now.
 

version

Well-known member
Someone recently recommended me Antoine Volodine.

Antoine Volodine’s Post-Exoticism

“WHY SUCH A FRENZY?” This question is asked by “the Blotno,” a celebrity journalist and police collaborator who stalks the margins of Antoine Volodine’s newly translated novel Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. In a proceeding that combines elements of a celebrity interview and an interrogation, Blotno questions a series of prisoners about their literary output, a body of writing they call “post-exoticism.” These prisoners are defeated revolutionaries who have since turned to writing, intransigent combatants in a lost struggle “against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies.” The reporter wants to know why the prisoners have undertaken such a frenzy of invention: new forms, new genres, new literary terms. A similar question might occur to Post-Exoticism’s readers; why this baroque complexity? Even the book’s title displays a tendency toward neologism and paradox, a tendency borne out in the succeeding pages of fractured narrative. So the question isn’t a bad one, despite its being asked by one of the novel’s proxy villains.

You can see why the journalist/collaborator/interrogator in Post-Exoticism starts there. The literary movement called “post-exoticism,” practiced in this novel by a group of imprisoned revolutionaries in a devastated world, fairly bursts with invention: there are dozens of authorial heteronyms that collocate different nationalities and languages (“Roman Nachtigall”; “Türkan Marachvilli”; “Erdogan Mayayo”); fake paratexts such as fictional frontispieces, fictional back matter, and the 11 “lessons” that theorize the movement (and the book one holds in one’s hands); and, above all, myriad newly invented post-exotic literary terms, such as “murmuract” and “narrative apnea” and “reticular progression.” Volodine’s entire body of work evinces this same prolific inventiveness: some 42 books, often in such post-exotic genres as “narracts” and “Shåggas” and “interjoists,” have so far been published under the names Antoine Volodine, Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, and Elli Kronauer.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I have been getting well into a writer called new juche recently, who could be described as weird/experimental. Im sure ive already mentioned him. I should issue a warning, he wont be for everyone, he is living in SE Asia and getting stuck into a lot of prostitution. So hes talking about that quite a lot, in a very frank way. But its also nature/place writing and quite poetic. Gets pretty deep and spiritual. Very similar to genet who ive always liked as a singular voice. Hes got that high low thing going on. . I have read three of his books now and they are all good, although one is miles better than the others, its called mountainhead. The others, ‘the devils’ and ‘stupid baby’ are pretty good though, they are put out by amphetamine sulphate who ive mentioned a few times. There is a good primer for him on denis coopers blog, with an extract of moutainhead.

https://denniscooperblog.com/please-welcome-to-the-world-new-juche-mountainhead-nine-banded-books/

But yeah i sent that link to a friend and he dint like it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I read Radiant Terminus by Volodine last year. A book with maybe more promise than delivery but it certainly had something. In the book there was this kind of train of dead (or undead maybe) soldiers that travels on this loop through the abandoned and radiated wilds of Russia and which the slightly more main characters occasionally encounter. This image had quite an effect on me. I suppose it is quite bleak, but at the same time I found something almost comforting about these half-asleep soldiers struggling to operate this train and constantly battling to stay awake and keep it moving. I often have insomnia and sometimes when lie awake I try and fixate on kinda dreamlike and pleasant things in the hope that they will lead me to dreams - one of the things I picked was that train, I almost like to imagine I'm part of its undead crew stopping and dreamily dying by a campfire - too hot in the front, too cold behind - while those members of the crew who were performers in their previous lives entertain us with out of tune harmonica solos and readings from insane made up books. Though to be honest it doesn't work that well.
Anyway that book definitely had some kind of beautiful madness that recalled Stalker to me... although maybe it didn't deliver on all its promises. Perhaps Stalker doesn't either in a sense. I have heard that Volodine's novels all exist in the same world and you get that fake literary movement recurring along with undead soldiers and immortal scientists and so on in the deformed steppe... powerful stuff in there but... once again, I don't get it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Interesting lists. Funny how on the first two lists I've read virtually none... from then on I've read most of the authors at least.
Always meant to get round to Diderot... also should read The Book of Disquiet although I have this crazy idea that one day I'll be able to read it in Portuguese. It's for sale in several languages whenever you go in a bookshop here. Got Erewhon on my shelf... it got close to my to read pile at one point but retreated again sadiy.
Laura Oldfield-Ford, dunno if she ever posted here but she used to do a fanzine in East London, met her a few times, think I'm still friends with her on fb - as with Reza Negarestani too in fact. I think he was supposed to have a kind of graphic novel coming out at the end of 2019 but not sure it materialised.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I realise this thread is vague and scattershot without any real aim but I appreciate the suggestions, thanks.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
We went to the modern art museum in Lisbon yesterday and saw a couple of de Chiricos... reminded me of this book which I enjoyed and fits here

The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction," noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality."
Basically it's a long stream of consciousness rant as far as I remember but one of the better ones.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/645610.Hebdomeros
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
How about Richard Brautigan? Some find him too cutesy but I think there is a lot of darkness hidden not very far beneath the surface - and some of them (eg Trout Fishing in America or In Watermelon Sugar) are truly weird.
 

catalog

Well-known member
anyone heard of this guy? https://twitter.com/stevefinbow i got the mail out from amphetamine sulphate about his new book 'the mindshaft' and it sounds pretty good https://mailchi.mp/8363c5c4b9d7/august-as-newsletter-enter-the-mindshaft the link took a while to load. i like this riso type poster

25fd18f8-23f6-44b9-9af2-38922b12ea7e.jpg
 
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