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Review: Paramount Room
Alright, lay it on us. For the month of June, we want your most pretentious, obscure, and otherwise esoteric reads. The book you prominently display on your coffee table when guests come over or bring up in intellectual discussions smugly. The one that makes you feel superior to other human beings for having read and being able to discuss intelligently.
As long as we can find it here, here, or here, or if you can point us in the right direction to hunt it down, we're game.
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The Illiminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
A towering homage to drugs, pretention, conspiracy and obscurity. I hated it, but loved it all the same. I imagine the authors elbowing each other and saying "This is just crazy enough to work."
If so, they were right.
William Gaddis' JR would be a good one. I've been reading it for five years and still haven't finished it!
And of course there's always my favorite son of Champaign, D.F. Wallace ... go ahead and pick any of those and I'll discuss 'em with you.
And, no offense mike, but I think neither Tom Robbins nor Robert Anton Wilson qualify as making "you feel superior to other human beings for having read and being able to discuss intelligently." Are they fun? Hell yeah! But not exactly brain-benders.
best book ever
JR is one of my favorite books ever, but I thought it was a pretty easy read compared to, say, A Frolic of His Own.
The metafictional properties, galloping POV and contradictory narratives in Illuminatus made it pretty mind-bending for me. Of course, I read it when I was much younger, so perhaps my memory of it inflates actual the effect.
My favorite DFW is Infinite Jest, of course, but I find Broom of the System doesn't get nearly the credit it deserves. Excellent book, despite the fact that the first hundred or so pages are a bit shaky.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Infinite Jest, baby. And I read every page (though I skimmed some of that stuff when those two guys are standing on a mountain in Tuscon, Az.)
You may not discuss DFW or Gaddis without also discussing Thomas Pynchon. It's the law.
Latest: Against the Day. 1,100 pages.
Themes: zeppelins, prime numbers, mining, anarchism, hollow earth, shamanism, capitalism, several dozen others.
Locations: Chicago, Colorado, Mexico, Venice, Göttingen, central Asia, more.
Time period: roughly the two decades preceding World War 1.
If you are a Pynchon beginner, try Gravity's Rainbow or Crying of Lot 49.
Good luck.
My copy of Unity and Struggle by Amilcar Cabral.
I "borrowed" if from the Ralph J. Bunche State Department Library, right out of college some years ago.
I just now goggled it and found that its sales for $285.78!
That library had a lot of interesting, obscure, and long outta print books like that! I wish I’d “borrowed” more instead of turning the lights off in the back room and sleeping away the hot D.C afternoons.
Thanks Jess,I wouldn’t have known its “value” had it not been for your post and on that note “Unity and Struggle” will now have a permanent place on the top shelf of book case number 3.
I print out the day's Chicagoist entries on my bubblejet and staple the ends.
p.s
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Hate to say it but I’m equally proud that it still has the State Department logo on it! Hows that for pretentious!
Ha! Someone beat me to Infinite Jest.
Leon Forrest--difficult, obscure *and* local.
Infinite Jest is great, but unless you want this edition to run for a couple months, maybe Oblivion is a better DFW choice.
Another great downstate author is Richard Powers, from whom I recommend The Gold Bug Variations, which is a great science/love story.
Also: Bertram Cope's Year, a forgotten Chicago classic.
Gravity's Rainbow is a beginner's book? Now I really do feel inferior. The most I can muster is Umberto Eco or Edward O. Wilson.
Com'on, Proust!
Or else "120 Days of Sodom" by de Sade ... if you've actually read that, you're in a select circle indeed.
Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. It's hilarious and poingant Stalinist-era satire of Soviet life by one of the best of the Russian authors.
Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. As the review located on the back of the book says, "One of the maddest and most perfectly paranoid, obsessively organized, etceterative assaults on the feeble human powers of concentration ever attempted."
Do *not* buy any abridged version! I have the Nyew York Review of Books edition, simply lovely.
In the catagory of books that I feel smug for having read:
Ulysses--Joyce
Sanctuary--Faulkner
The Master and Margarita--Bulgakov
Pretentious:
pretty much any lit crit book
Guns of the South.
Anyone up for the Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse AND House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Both awesomely rad, and I especially like referring to Hesse's as his 'magnum opus' for extra snottiness.
If it weren't for Wikipedia, I wouldn't have been able to make it through Foucault's Pendulum. It's the book that sits next to my stack of note-and-doodle-filled Moleskines, on the shelf above my LP collection next to my vintage Leicas.
i was in a book club once, and we all picked our favorite books. nothing too shocking: skinny legs and all; stranger in a strange land; confederacy of dunces --- and then this guy picked "group portrait with lady." heinrich boll, i think was the author. ?? huh? it wasn't a bad read, but i thought it was fairly obscure. several people had a hard time getting a hold of it.
also as far as obscurity goes, there's an author by the name of rob brezsny. he wrote a book called "televisionary oracle." he's the guy who writes the free will astrology horoscopes you'll find in the reader or wherever those get published. again, not very high brow, but obscure. i've never found anyone but friends of mind who've read him.
JM Robert's History of the World is always good for a bit of one-upmanship; The Collected Works of Shakespeare would be worth bragging about it if I could get through it... Absalom, Absalom was almost impenetrable. I look forward to the day when I've finished Finnegan's Wake and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
After those all that's really left that's more difficult is outside the realm of literature, as far as I know.
'Young Disraeli'
'Churchill's Grand Alliance'
'Mussolini's Italy'
and
'Love in a Cold Climate,' w/ 'The Pursuit of Love,' by Nancy Mitford.
The last isn't too esoteric or pretentious, but a slow read, considering its about one-third the size of the other titles.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago. I triple dog dare Chicagoist to read it cover to cover.
Otherwise, How about Dante's Divine Comedy?
Wow! A lot of you are way more mean than I am - I was going to say DFW's Infinite Jest, but I could never do that to Jess. And in a month? Painful.
Yeah, I wouldn't wish IJ on anyone if there's a one-month time limit. My final answer is DFW's Broom of the System, which is much more manageable in that time frame and has the added benefit of being more obscure.
Whet,
Are you talking about Forrest’s Devine Days?
No disrespect to the dead, and I know where not talking about “greatest books”, but
Oh My Gawd! Devine Days was horrible!
I read it a few years ago after I heard Forrest, was local, had died, and was being compared to Ellison and Faulkner. That 1135 page tomb sucked, but for the next few years, it haunted me, like it was my fault for missing something. I felt so bad about it that a couple of months ago, I reread it and it still sucked!!! I know I'll probably be visited by Leon Forrests angry ghost, but I’m sorry, that book sucked! What did you think?
This is kinda a tangent to the topic, but...
Oh My Gawd! Devine Days was horrible!
I used to work at Northwestern's campus bookstore. Forrest taught there. We had a section of the regular books department to highlight campus authors. Forrest was the only one arrogant enough to make special trips to the store just to be sure we had multiple copies of ALL his books at all times. But they weren't too hard to keep around, cuz nobody ever bought them. I always had the impression that his ego vastly outweighed his actual reputation or skill as a writer.
i'd have to go with The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand. it follows the growth of American thought into the modern world through a study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. it even won the pulitzer. nonfiction is good.
if you want to be a little more mainstream, i'd have to say v by pynchon or ulysses by joyce
Master and Margarita! It is one the best, most creative books that I have ever read on this topic. Bulgacov is a brilliant author.
Louis Menand is also the guy who attacked the "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" woman in the New Yorker.
You can totally finish Infinite Jest in less than a month!
And Rob, good call on the de Sade, although I think that only gets the "obscure" vote, since no one really reads his stories or plays any more. But it's not really brain melting material either. Unless you find Ayn Rand to be particularly challenging, and I don't think you do.
"I print out the day's Chicagoist entries on my bubblejet and staple the ends."
+500 to woodlawnchuck
Black Zodiac by Charles Wright
It may be the most pretentious, obscure, and esoteric collection of poetry ever assembled. And yet, I like it.
Speaking of pretentious, here is a back cover review:
Black Zodiac concentrates Charles Wright's considerable poetic endowment into a new poignance that has to be termed religious. Some of the poems achieve an authentic gnosis in a rapt mode of negative transcendence.
hip hotels atlas, by herbert ypma
it's such a great coffee table book...hasn't left my coffee table in two years.
How is it possible that "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" didn't make it into the first 35 comments? Or "Dancing Wu Li Masters"? Honestly. Infinite Jest. Pah.
I'll second Danielewski's House of Leaves. There are freakin' pages with one word on them and stuff you have to read backwards... I felt really stupid sometimes, but it's actually worth it. A beautiful book.
My own personal smugread is War and Peace. I've done it twice, and it's really that good. Just keep a notebook of character's names - my prof taught me that.
"authentic gnosis" - ha.
I would say Dante's Inferno
Ok, I have to go with the multiple part answer, which I know is kind of a cop-out, but tough cookies.
1) For sheer madcap fun: Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo." (Man I love this book. Read it as if you were playing Jazz. Have fun with it.)
2) For the book that I'd most like people to pick up, leaf through, and go, "what the... You actually READ this?": Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves" (a rather disturbing labyrinth of narratives, footnoted footnotes, and typographical shenanigans that has genuinely freaked out just about everyone I know who read it, including myself) or Joyce's "Ulysses."
3) For the absolute penultimate in esoteric and intolerably cerebral fiction, nothing - I repeat, nothing - beats Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." It is, indeed, entirely unreadable, and I triple dog dare anyone to attempt a reading of the entire thing (yes, that's right, I created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping all other dares and going right for the throat). The most opaque of DFW, Pynchon, and Faulkner don't even come close to approximating the Pandora's Box of linguistic bedevilment that is "the Wake" (e.g., it is approximated that Joyce used between 60 and 70 different languages in it).
A distant ex used to carry around in his book bag the complete works of Oscar Wilde. Now that's pretentious.
My vote for obscure: The Gormenghast Trilogy
Another idea...How about reading the Koran?
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco is great for a flip through. You are guaranteed your guest will run into a word they can't define without an OED. And the synopsis will seem close enough to "The Da Vinci Code" that they will try to read it. Also, it is actually a good story and worth reading for fun.
It's a small group that tries to read Eco, a smaller group that finishes his stories, and an even smaller group that understands.
See how smug and condescending it has made me?
Thomas Mann - "The Magic Mountain" - arguably the most influential work of 20th century German literature. An amazing tale of a man visiting his tubercular cousin (it's topical, too!) in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps (Davos, actually - topical again!) ends up meeting all these inmates who embody different aspects of pre-WWI Europe (including the hedonist, "Mynheer Peeperkorn"!!)and things just get more philosophically intense from there. And if all that is not enough to sell you, Blonde Redhead wrote a song inspired by the book, called 'Magic Mountain."
And if *that* is not enough, I submit the following sentence from the book's wikipedia entry:
"His vast composition is erudite, subtle and, most of all, ambiguous."
Umm, they forgot AWESOME!
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Nabokov. Complicated. Incestuous. Obscure. Awesome. (Though many will question their command of the English language upon reading.)
I have to admit I only got partway into Divine Days, because I decided I probably had to read Ulysses first (just started). I liked what I read, though I've tried other Forrest books and found them impenetrable, despite being, like, an English major.
Fun William Gaddis fact that might sway your opinion: the nation's Gaddis expert teaches at UIC (Joseph Tabbi, who edited his papers). Personally the only Gaddis fiction I've read is A Frolic of his Own, which I didn't like, and Agape Agape, which wasn't as good as the essay that inspired it, but his essay/errata collection is really awesome.
Gravity's Rainbow you could do in a month, but pretty much everyone I know who's read it (including me) gives up the first time.
BTW, the thing about Forrest is that his big influence was Faulkner. Which explains a lot.
Oh, and to really get pretentious academic street cred? "The Last Puritan" by George Santayana, 'A memoir in the form of a novel." Harvard Professor of Philosophy in the 30's, student of William James, and the subsequently instructor of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein.
And just in case you don't read it, here are some Santayana quotables you can drop to get noticed by that super-hot philosophy/literature grad student:
"Music is essentially useless, as life is..."
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (oft-misqoyed and mis-attributed!)
"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."
"An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."
"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
Awesome again.
While Ulysses is difficult, I did make it through it. I have been trying for years to try to make it through Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and it is sitting prominently on one of my book cases so I vote for that.
This is the perfect thread going into Printers Row weekend. My list is getting bigger. That Santayana cat sounds, well, awesome.
How about "Lineages of the Absolutist State" by Perry Anderson- 600 pages of Marxist scholarship on the formation of the modern state on the basis of Roman Law. I loved it, but I might be the only one.
Obviously if you wanted to be a real tool you would own all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.
Come on, DFW and Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow? Did no one else read the instruction about "obscure"?
How about "The Tunnel" by William Gass? Some similarities can be drawn between Pychon, Wallace and the like. Apparently it also took him like 20 years to write or something.
Or Wittengenstein's Mistress by David Markson. I will not even begin to describe.
I definitely second Metaphysical Club and Master and Margarita.
And- I suggest Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz (the Borchardt translation). Its a strange, meandering, and often funny novel that follows a narrator as he tries to make sense of what are probably a series of random objects and events- all with an underlying theme of masturbation. What makes it even better is that its his less popular novel, but shouldn't Ferdydurke be too mainstream for us?
Mark down another vote for Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's not as challenging to get through as the more academic books people are listing, but who says dense/obscure books have to be painful to read? This one has a beautiful frame narrative and should only be read in an empty house (or in my case, it was a deserted dorm building) in the dead of night.
Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Have to admit I only got about halfway through it while working at Northwestern's Africana library, but it is good. The Kenyan romance novels and Madam & Eve comics were far too tempting for me to actually finish literature!
C
word, yo! And I even love saying the name
Ngugi wa Thiong'o!
I've got his "Devil on the Cross" and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature from my Imprisoned Voices
Literature class! That was back in the day when I was the radical scholar and what not