Riddley Walker, Omensetter's Luck, other big strange books.

The Bible. One of the biggest. One of the strangest.

I've never gotten past page one of Riddley Walker, but I read Omensetter's Luck a few years ago and really liked it. It looked, felt, smelt, tasted like Hawthorne or Melville for the 20th century, if that makes any sense. It was a hard read for a few pages, then suddenly the rhythms of the language and the era it was set in suddenly clicked into place, and it was smooth going after that.

hahaha, I just realized why you asked about that one — the blurb on the back of the Bantam edition of Dhalgren, am I right?

Riddley Walker is fantastic. I haven't read a book which stayed with me like that for so long.

Never heard of the other one... tell us about it.

I believe David Foster Wallace once listed Omensetter's Luck in an article on underappreciated classics, along with Wittgenstein's Mistress. There was a time when if you pulled up on of the the books on the list on Amazon, you would found out that customers who bought it also bought the other four.

I feel as though these book names should mean something to me.

Not familiar with these books, but for big and strange check out Yuriy Tarnawsky's Three Blondes and Death. Really strange and beautiful.

Here's part of the back cover blahblahblah for Omensetter's Luck.

"Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, is chronicles — through the voices of various participants and observers — the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts."

By the way, it's not a big ponderous tome — only 300 pgs.

Anything big enough to stub my toe-on counts as ponderous!

things that might fit in here:

Richard Powers "The Gold Bug Variations" - i own this and i look at it occassionally but always put it down after a few pages. I've read some Powers (Ploughing the Dark and Galatea 2.2) and i think he's clever and writes well but i find him a bit of a cold fish. The protagonists in the 2 novels i have read by him are pretty unlikeable.

all of Gaddis - i got 100 or so pages into "The Recognitions" and 40 or so into "JR". i might go back to JR but it's unlikely i'll go back to TR.

i wish hstencil posted here. i think he's a "big difficult book" lover is he not?

I tried reading whatever that "Three Farmers..." book was and didn't get into it at all.

Also I read all of "A Frolic Of His Own", perhaps as a sort of dare. Gaddis doesn't seem difficult, just long.

I tried to read the Powers AI book, it was called Galatea N.X or something like that and I couldn't be bothered to finish it. I just didn't care about his ideas, which is all he's got in the end, really. Characters, not really.

So I picked up Riddley Walker (expensive!) and I'm really, really, really diggin' it. Here's a particularly fine excerpt from page 33, in the hope it'll whet the appetite of somebody else here, and then I'll be able to chat about it:

20. Bad Tym it wuz then. Peapl din no if they wud be alyv 1 day tu the nex. Din even no if thayd be alyv 1 min tu the nex. Sum stuk tu gether sum din. Sum tyms thay dru lots. Sum got et so uthers cud liv. Cudn be sure uv nuthin din no wut wuz sayf tu eat or drink & tryin tu keap wuyd of uther forajers & dogs it wuz nuthing onle Luck if enne 1 stayed alyv.

Is the whole book like that?

Yup. It's like a Chaucerian take on futurespeak. The author, Russell Hoban, has something of a cult following. He's also responsible for the phenomenal children's "Frances" series (Bedtime for Francis, A Baby Sister for Frances, etc., etc., etc.

http://www.thelittleredschoolhouse.us/i/breadandjam.jpg

Haha! Awesome.

Pr00de, are you the same as Prude?

Yup.

Wow, now that you quoted an excerpt and mentioned the "Frances" books connection, I just realized a friend of mine was telling me about *Ridley Walker*, and how great and bizarre it is, a couple of weeks ago. I think he said it's out of print and hard to find?

Yeah, it's hard to find. But Powell's has a few copies, and Amazon had a ton of used copies last time I looked. I recommend the expanded edition for the notes and glossary in the back.

Gah! I almost read the spoiler ending.

amazon.co.uk has new cheap copies of 'riddley walker' with an introduction by will self. i was reading a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat recently & was surprised to find out that the author was russell hobans daughter phoebe.

i was going to say, yeah, amazon.co.uk - bcz they randomly recommended it to me this morning, and i was trying to work out where on earth i recognised it from when i opened the forum..

gaddis seemed really old-fashionedly big when i tryed* to read the recognitions. i mean, not sufficiently different from something dickens could have written. although i kind of like dickens, so.

omensetter's luck is by william gass, whose 'the tunnel' is bigger, and 'willie master's lonesome wife' might be stranger. i never finished reading the latter because i was too embarrassed to go up to the desk and get it issued, god help me.

*this looks so much better than "tried". i'm sure it was standard at some point in the past.

Oh. I have Willie Master's although the writing in it looked so dull that I haven't been bothered to read it.

I'll add and defend.

Add: Tristram Shandy, a book that I still can't believe wasn't written in the 20th C.

Defend. Galatea 2.2. I think it takes a lot to humanize a computer program, which Powers does so well that the ending was affecting.

Categories can be odious, but "big strange books" sounds a little like what is called slipstream fiction, I think. That's a toothsome list, if nothing else.

Riddley Walker is a haunting book. Twice I've found abandoned copies of it in public places.

that list reminds me of something i think i said on the fantasy thread, that pretty much everything that used to be an SF trope is now uh 'valid' in 'mainstream fiction' thus the genre itself is a bit.. lacking. that said i'm not convinced of this, mostly because i think that, contra the first paragraph there, there are a hellofalot of contemporaneous hugo-nebula-clarke type award winners better than the handmaid's goshdarned tale.

This is weird. I was just talking to a friend about Riddley Walker yesterday, then I stumbled on a quote I'd pulled from it at some point a couplel of years ago, and how I suspect the third Mad Max film (Beyond Thunderdome) seriously cribbed off of the book etc etc (did they ever credit it?). This is an incredible book. I thought of it earlier this summer when I was in North Wales and there was a Punch and Judy show on the promenade. Gave me goosebumps. I might as well paste the quote here:

Whats so terbel its jus that knowing of the horrer in every thing. The horrer waiting. I dont know how to say it. Like say you myt get cut bad and all on a sudden there you are with your leg opent up and youre looking at the mussl fat and boan of it. You all ways knowit what wer unner the skin only you dont want to see that bloody meat and boan. Never mynd.

Actually, there were two:

The Littl Man the Addom he begun tu cum a part he cryd, I wan tu go I wan tu stay. Eusa sed, Tel mor. The Addom sed, I wan tu dark I want tu lyt I wan tu day I wan tu nyt. Eusa sed, Tel mor. The Addom sed, I wan tu woman I wan tu man. Eusa sed, Tel mor. The Addom sed, I want tu plus I want tu minus I wan tu big I wan tu littl I wan tu aul I wan tu nuthing.

After only a couple of pages, you can follow the language with only the occasional problem. From what I remember, Eusa is a god- or Jesus-like figure. Addom, obv, is a play on the biblical Adam and the Atom which, when split, resulted in the warped post-apocalyptic England (Kent, to be precise) the book is set in. I'm going to read this again.

The Mekons quote Riddley Walker in a couple of songs (I think), including "Garage D'Or":

"I never sung no beginning becaws you wont never fynd no beginning its long gone and far pas. What ever youre after youwl never fynd the beginning of it thats why youwl all ways be too late. Onlyes thing youwl ever fynd is the end of things. What ever happens itwl be what you dint want to happen. What ever dont happen thatwl be the thing you wantit. Take your choosing how you like youwl get what you dont want."

Someone should tell these guys about the Mekons connection.

(There is also a reference to Beyond Thunderdome near the bottom.)

I do that Riddley Walker Annotations site that David just linked - I found this thread by searching for Riddley Walker, as I occasionally do because I love seeing people's reactions to it. Yes, the Walker/Aunty/"tel" stuff in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a deliberate homage; Miller admitted as much somewhere, though I've lost the reference. (Now that I think of it, pig shit is crucial in both stories too.)

I've never managed to read Gass's novels - will give Omensetter's Luck another try. His short stories in "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" are very good and very economical - something I didn't expect after reading his juicy but sort of intoxicated aesthetic polemic "On Being Blue".