"Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words, lashed with purple prose and black humor; novels patterned after myths, the Tarot, the Stations of the Cross, a chessboard, a dictionary, an almanac, the genetic code, a game of golf, a night at the movies; novels with unusual layouts, paginated backward, or with sentences running off the edges, or printed in different colors, a novel on yellow paper, a wordless novel in woodcuts, a novel of first chapters, a novel in the form of an anthology, Internet postings, or an auction catalog; huge novels that occupy a single day, slim novels that cover a lifetime; novels with footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, star charts, fold-out maps, or with a reading comprehension test or Q&A supplement at the end; novels peppered with songs, poems, lists, excommunications; novels whose chapters can be read in different sequences, or that have 150 possible endings; novels that are all dialogue, all footnotes, all contributors' notes, or one long paragraph; novels that begin and end midsentence, novels in fragments, novels with stories within stories; towers of babble, slang, shoptalk, technical terms, sweet nothings; give me many-layered novels that erect a great wall of words for protection against the demons of delusion and irrationality loose in the world."
These are all novels I want to read and weite. My fist and so far only novel is a little like that, it's a narrative of a group of wroters who wanted to be free to write in a world where even writing is dictated by norms, i.e. the ral world. It's in Spanish, though, but also my dungeons are experiments in content amd writing, and these are in English.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite writers are Burroughs, Rimbaud, Ballard.
That sounds very cool, Vagabundork! It sounds a little like you're creating a fictional group of Oulipo writers.
DeleteMy favorite book that I've never finished and been reading for years now is The Peregrine. It's not a "novel" exactly, but I think it might fit in here, as it's just a very intense birdwatching log.
ReplyDeleteI just read the publisher's description, and that sounds pretty intense. NYRB has a great selection.
DeleteThere's a whole lot of fantasy novels that would be infinitely better if presented as 300-500 1-page in-universe encyclopedia entries.
ReplyDeleteWith fake footnotes.
Apparently no one was willing to follow Diana Wynne Jones's lead after she wrote "The Tough Guide to Fantasyland" - more's the pity!
DeleteTalking with Proteus Est on Discord, I was also taught / reminded of (had I heard it before?) the term "ergodic literature" to describe the kind of texts that make you jump through hoops to assemble the narrative:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature
I've seen "ergodic" used to describe reading RPGs for fun. Reading a Monster Manual for example requires a lot of mental gymnastics to understand what it's telling you about a world or a story.
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