The strangest book ever written

I was reminded recently of the strangest book ever written:

Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe

You know you're in trouble when radishes start growing out of your shins! Only for the strangest of heart!

Or maybe it was
The Tenant by Roland Topor?

Or the dadaist Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry?

I am also thinking about Rhinocéros by Ionesco...

I'm sorry, but the most bizarre book ever committed to dead trees is A Neurologist in Search of a Brain: A Collection of 101 Rhymed Poignant Tales.
I think Dr. Elo must have taken part in too many LSD experiments. For science's sake, of course.

That's a great title...

#4

That's one of my faves! So funny!

#1

Yeah, the Japanese have a gift for the odd. I can't remember whether it was Oe or Abe--I think Abe--who wrote a story about a giant floating baby... Ai something? Kawabata has lots of weird ones too--the one where a lover asks for his darling's arm, and she detaches it and gives it to him (actual body part, not a prosthesis); the sleeping beauties brothel, where men pay to sleep--literally--next to drugged women and so on and on.

#6

Not to mention the The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, in which the samurai lord of the title is sexually aroused by severed heads with their noses bashed in (I'll leave the rest up to your imaginations -- think perverted thoughts and you'll probably be right).

(I'm surprised you didn't mention this one yourself, Lola -- squeamish, are we?)

#7

You win! I was thinking about a different Tanizaki, his dirty old man, but Musashi completely slipped my mind!

squeamish, are we?

Pfffft, PFFFFFTTT to you, I say! And to disprove it further, I'll add the detail you omit--that the hero reaches his beloved burrowing through her toilet!

Yeah, that's one mighty strange story. But also... humorous. Almost playful. More so than any other Tanizaki I've read.

6!!- just the one I was going to point out. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. A younger friend of mind, upon whom I lavished the book, claims it affected her so strongly she had nightmares about it. So much for May-September (really more mid-August, I think...).

I would like to think of exceedingly strange books that were not intentionally written toward that effect. An illustrated encyclopedia of burn-wounds, a registry of beatified dwarf clerics in medieval Spain, etc.

I wonder whether Bram Stoker planned to make The lair of the white worm as weird as it turned out.

An illustrated encyclopedia of burn-wounds,

And my idea for quickie-money making atlas of the more picturesque mouse mutants was nixed by DK!

a registry of beatified dwarf clerics in medieval Spain

Okay, here we have a serious contender.

I wonder whether Bram Stoker planned to make The lair of the white worm as weird as it turned out.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE MOVIE????
(If not, drop whatever you're doing and find a copy.)

For a while at my house, we would just chant "White Worm! White Worm!" back and forth at each other to reduce ourselves to giggles.

**feigning nonchalance**

Oh, there's a movie?

TAKE ME TO IT NOW!!!1!

See, to me, Stoker is such a bad prose stylist that I couldn't feel the weirdness in Lair of the White Worm (I have this same problem with crappy "classic" science fiction-no matter how great the initial conceit, I can't get the "sense of wunda" if the prose is so bad I'm guffawing or snoozing the whole time). I could see that theoretically it was there but damned if I could feel any of it!

The movie though is a total hoot!

(I should note parenthetically that I've been on a clearly masochistic project to read some early "queer" sci-fi and it's probably demolished whatever little patience I've ever possessed for really really bad prose. ZOMG!!!11! Seriously, no one in their right mind should ever willingly read Spartan Planet. Just consider that little warning my selfless gift to you)

Stoker's prose is... bad, yes (in the sense that no sane person could call it "good"), but The Lair transcends mere badness (and again, NOT in the "so bad it's good" way) thanks to his bizarre conceits, combined with remarkable structural incoherence, so that in parts it reads almost like some--tragically failed--literary experiment. I wondered whether he didn't jot it down in sentences on scraps of paper, lost half, and mixed up the rest. I wondered many things about it.

some early "queer" sci-fi

Really, how early? When do first specimens appear?

Or perhaps Going Rogue?

What about undecipherable books? They're weird too! First, there is the Codex Seraphinianus. It's still a mystery, because the language has not been deciphered yet. In the same vein, there's also the Voynich Manuscript.

oh the movie of the Lair is awesome. It's Ken Russell, and no one makes better bad movies than old Kenny. (Remember The Rainbow? chortle) Hugh Grant in his ephebe days (yum) and Amanda Donohoe (more yum). Lola, you will love it.

#13: TAKE ME TO IT NOW!!!1!

Well, since you insist...

Trailer (in black and white, for some reason...)

{Spoilers...} Climactic scene, with Catherine Oxenberg

Watch at your own risk, NSFW, second link is spoilerific, etc., etc.

Bob, I found the trailer in colour.

As for the thread topic, it's probably a sign of my long-irreversible depravity that I don't consider the authors/works above that I've read all that strange. Now, one of the strangest movies I've seen is Macunaíma, an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Mario de Andrade - and not having gotten hold of the novel yet, I couldn't say whether or not the book has quite the same quality of strangeness that the movie does - but for those who enjoy a succession of unsettling moments in their cinema, at least one order beyond Jodorowsky, the film is worth watching.

Ken Russell! That's promising. Anyone seen his Gothic, the homage to Byron's, Mary Shelley's and Polidori's little genre-spawning get-together? Terrible movie. I wouldn't WANT anyone else to film the White Worm.

#21

Huh.

I have a shameful, secret fondness for 'Gothic'. I find it absolutely delicious in an over-the-top way. Fabulous cast chewing the scenery like there's no tomorrow (oh, Julian Sands, how I do adore thee!).

When I first read Federico Andahazi's wildly grotesque, winkingly fantastic version of this same scenario, Las piadosas, I had a 'Gothic' flash-back and could only see these actors in Andahazi's characters.

Oh, I fully share your fondness for it, marietherese. Andahazi--isn't he that Argentinian shrink...? I might be confusing him with some other Argentinian shrink. Apparently there's tons of them branching out into the arts, down there.

>#21 Huh

To quote you from your reading thread: So now to the question of lunacy in art. In short, how does one tell? It isn't enough or even essential, that something "makes no sense", because nonsense exists as a playful genre on its own. Seems to me that mad art is whatever is produced by mad people, and nothing else. (As for the question of how one can tell mad people from the non-mad, always... hell if I know.)

As I was saying earlier, I don't find some of the works mentioned above "strange" - because though they might be uncommon or unusual, maybe even revolting or unsettling, it's generally clear that they're the products of rational if imaginative and exploratory minds. Macunaima (the movie at any rate) is, on the other hand, an excellent candidate for "lunacy in art", because it makes even Surrealism look over-elaborate, like so much clever trivia.

Benwaugh has a copy of the book so he might be able to illuminate us on the differences between the book and the film, if he has seen the latter.

It was a perfectly insignificant huh, a huh of nothing. I don't recall having heard of Macunaima before.

Anyway, according to my litmus test, it's not lunatic unless the author was certified.

Ah, I thought the trailer made you go huh. I had a similar reaction to the entire movie. Still worth watching.

Gothic is fab. It was all downhill for Ken Russell after that movie. Perhaps it was the Curse.......

What? You don't mean... that Scottish play?

One of my favorite bedtime reads in times past has been Strindberg's Inferno/From an Occult Diary, wherein the dramatist obsesses over alchemy whilst enduring, and detailing, the psychic sexual attacks of his ex-wife. A delightful travelogue through a deranged mind.

Touchstone all fucked up.

Oh yes. Now Strindberg presents an interesting conundrum--an occasionally mad sane man, or vice versa? I'd bet on the vv. Mad, mad as a hatter.

I can't recall--where is "From an occult diary" from--his diaries? Because you may want to find his Blue Book (it's several volumes originally, not sure how it's been published in English), pretty much the compendium of all his lunacies, alchemical, philosophical, sexual, political.

Well, that's what happens when you fiddle around with quicksilver. ;)

The red room (the very first work by him I read, a semi-autobiographical tale of a group of young bohemian friends--painter, journalist, writer... struggling to make it with/without selling out) and Black banners (Schwarze Fahnen) (good god, I remember almost nothing of it--decadence, everything going to hell, end of times?)

Red black blue

Posting just for the touchstones.

Plaidoyer d'un fou (what's the English version?) shows that sometimes he KNEW he was mad. That one is all marital troubles and sexual obsessions. Another one for your bedside, Mak!

ETA: answering my own q.--A Madman's Defense/ manifesto