Bizarre Books

[Smilla]

Just finished Tristram Shandy and had your mind blown completely to shit? Want to nit-pick the historical implausibilities of The Gemstone File[/color]? Just found a book that is barely functional enough to be called one because it was written on lambskin and bound with eel hair, yet it entertained you never the less? Bring it here.

My submission: A very strange but surprisingly enjoyable read by performance artist Joanna Frueh called Swooning Beauty. It's a memoir that reads to me like an exotic hybrid between an academic treatise and a stand-up comedy routine, dealing with the monumental change Frueh went through after her parents died within months of each other and her husband of ten years asked for a divorce.

It was so weird at first that I didn't think I would be able to finish even one chapter. Frueh, whose backround is apparently in various forms of visual media as well as aesthetics, became somewhat obsessed with Mel Gibson during her grieving process. It took me a while to get into the book, which I've found actually contains original wisdom about loss and recovery, because every once in a while she revisits her love for Gibson's films. I kept going, "...but, Mel Gibson? Really?"

Great book. Totally bizarre.

[forever1267]

I'm gonna have to go with House of Leaves. It's the haunted house story about the house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. And it's also the story, in the footnotes about some one who is researching the book or the video or something. Also it has

pages

                 that

                       look

                             like 
       
                                   this

for no apparent reason

Creepy in theory, but absolutely bizarre in context.

[Smilla]

I was wondering if someone was going to post about HoL. Definitely one of the more bizarre books I've encountered. One of the things I noticed about the alterations in the text is that after a while, I got really, really into those passages. One word that I'd expect to be at the end of one page would actually be on the next one (or the next one after that) and I would notice that and totally tweek out. I felt the device was designed to engage the reader's eye, evoke hyperrections, and convey the sense of spatial and psychological distortion the characters were enduring. That textual feature was what helped the book work its impressive mindfuck mojo, I thought.

Or, maybe that's just me.

[sumire]

Ooh, yeah, I thought House of Leaves was brilliant for that. (I ended up bored by the framing story about the druggie, though, and skipped a lot of it.)

I've always wanted to see the Codex Seraphinianus, but there aren't any copies in Hawaii.

When I was about four or five years old, I got this strange picture book, The Magic Carpet and the Cement Wall (yeah, that cover has 1978 written all over it) from a garage sale somewhere. It was about a brother and sister who fly out of their house at night on a magic carpet, over the countryside, and into a mountain cave, where eventually... they come to a cement wall. I don't remember it very well now, but my parents found it weird enough that they were convinced it was published by some kind of cult, and they surreptitiously disposed of the book by the time I was six or seven. The WorldCat synopsis says, "Lindsay and Sammy live in an environment where there is little understanding and learn through their journey on a magic carpet to trust themselves and to know the difference between love and need," so maybe they were right. And there was a bit where the boy gives the girl the nickname Q.T., cleverly pronounced "cutie," which strikes me as a kind of incestuous thing to call your sister.

[Deleted]

sumire said:

Ooh, yeah, I thought House of Leaves was brilliant for that. (I ended up bored by the framing story about the druggie, though, and skipped a lot of it.)

I've always wanted to see the Codex Seraphinianus, but there aren't any copies in Hawaii.

Yeah, it seemed like as soon as the story about the house got good and creepy, the narrative would cut back to Johnny and his drug and sex problems. Go away, I want to read about the infinite house.

OMG, on Fametracker there was a similar thread and someone posted about the Codex Seraphinianus, but I forgot the title completely! I'm so glad you posted it.

[Deleted]

I couldn't deal with HOL and abandoned it about 1/3 of the way into it. I didn't mind the way the words were positioned on the page but I hated how you'd be reading, see a footnote mark, go down to read the footnote and then have to read 5 pages of that footnote then flip back to the story, lather rinse and repeat.

That combined with the fact that they took a really cool concept and made it boring as hell, I returned it to the library without any regret.

[viridian]

House of Leaves was the first book I thought of when I saw this topic! The plot about the house was very creepy, but I grew a little impatient with Johnny's footnotes too. It was a clever way of showing his degenerating mental state, but it wasn't nearly as engaging to read.

Anything by Lovecraft is incredibly bizarre. You can suss out that there's a kernel of story in there somewhere, but it's possibly the most overwrought writing ever! So many adjectives and going on about gibbous moons.

[hobocamp]

Did anyone read the next book the HoL guy wrote? (I can't be bothered to look up his name or the title of the book...) I was planning on it, but it looked too annoying--the book is split in half, one upside-down, both on each page. It seems like a hassle to read, and it didn't strike me as engaging like HoL.

[starskin]

I've never read House of Leaves, but what I've heard about it makes me think that the author borrowed heavily from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. There's no crazy formatting, but there are several stories going on at once, and it is being narrated by a madman, but you don't realize how mad he actually is until well into the story. It's based around a 999 line poem by a murdered poet, with the narrator adding his own increasingly bizarre footnotes and a very bizarre index. There's about 4 stories going on: the poem, the madman's footnotes, the index, and the *acutal* story of what happened, which is only ever in the subtext.

It's his most successful work besides Lolita and it was a tantric excerise in patience to read, but it seriously got under my skin.

[mrpancake]

I thought the book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was really strange. Some of the stories were okay, but other parts were totally irritating and weird. Maybe I'm just not into the whole avant garde thing - I prefer "normal" books.