Living in a world slowed down with so much time on our hands and bandwidth for our minds to wander has me doing just that.
I suddenly started thinking about the strangest books that I've read at different points in my life, living in different countries, pursuing varying amusements. What did they have in common and why did I find them so strange that I literally could not keep them around? These titles are not on my bookshelf and are bound by themes of…
Isolation
Distopic or a distortion of what we easily recognise as everyday life
Definitions of things are reimagined
Yearning for connection
The books (in order of strangeness)
The Wasp Factory - the most 'normal' recognisable setting of the list but so so out there
The Flame Alphabet
The Face of Another
The Book of Dave
Under The Skin - An admission. I watched the film and was so unsettled I read up on it and only then discovered it was based on a book with an even stranger plot.
All titles were equally disturbing so finding a way to order them I had to distill what exactly troubled me given my particular set of sensibilities as a reader, and to a lesser extent a consumer of films. As mentioned in its listing; The Wasp Factory was quite ordinary in setting compared to the rest and it is this that troubled me the most. Its like reading about serial killers or real life murders - which I do not because knowing something that could actually happen is scarier than obvious fanciful sci-fi imaginings. Without giving away the twist, I’ll say that it troubled me only because of the characterisation and beliefs of the main protagonist leading up to it and its slight echo to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - where the horror lies more in people and what they do rather than in the so called ‘monster’. I ended up selling this book to a secondhand bookshop in Amsterdam.
I don’t quite remember where I lived when I read The Flame Alphabet but I’m quite sure I picked it up in a Barnes & Noble while I was visiting family in the New Jersey for an extended holiday, and that it may not have travelled back with me to wherever I called home at the time. Like most of these titles I have blocked most of the story out but I remember being drawn in by the dystopian premise, the focus on language, the big people/little people power reversal. All very promising. Ultimately I couldn’t quite get on board with the weirdness from the resulting fall out of the apocalyptic climax. It was a bit too abstract. The experience of reading the book was like walking across a bridge that from the outset seemed familiar and ‘doable’ but got increasingly narrow, and then there was fog and you couldn’t see ahead, and at the point of no return you looked down and only then realised that you were suspended many many tens of feet far from the ground. I’m scared of heights.
The most recent read of all the books on the list is The Face of Another. I remember feeling like I was reading a long, macabre poem; but I think this may have been because I was reading an English translation of a Japanese novel. I love reading books that have been translated from Japanese because the stories read so clean in that they are not leaden down with unnecessary prose - at least to me. This sparseness reminds me of poetry for some reason. In the case of this book, it also made the story equally accessible and inaccessible - inducing a ‘Really? That’s what’s happening right now?’ and ‘No, that can’t be what’s happening right now’ response as I read and read re-read the same pages. With all of these books I was compelled (by my admittedly sensitive nature) to get them off my bookshelf stat; but this one gave me pause a couple of times. In fact it’s probably the only one that I would attempt to re-read.
With The Book of Dave we get further down my list, meaning my disturbance is slightly more diluted but not due to the material - because this story is insane, but I guess due to my familiarity with the author; having a highly visible (for a writer) media profile in the UK. I like the absurd; so the premise of an angry, crazy taxi driver named Dave who keeps a journal of musings - basically rants, that is later used as a basis of a religion where he is worshiped as a god some time in the future after a cataclysmic flood was a promising one. But this future had some weird biological mutational stuff happening that distracted me and my phobias just couldn’t handle it.
The only reason that Under The Skin is lowest on this list and thus the least strange read is because it involves aliens so is the most improbable. Also, I consumed (an accidental nod to the protagonist) this in film form and as previously mentioned the book synopsis seems all the more strange and has thus far gone unread by me. Another reason is that at the end of the film I actually had a lot of sympathy for the ‘monster’ after what from my perspective are two situations where she is clearly victimised and the thread that runs through the story is that the ‘monster’ is basically a slave herself - this may be me mixing up the film and the premise of the book. Although I found this film strange and creepy; it did stay with me after a while and if I ever feel brave enough I may eventually read the novella.
Despite being very sensitive and easily troubled by anything the least bit scary and therefore wary of what I start, I’ve read a number of ‘out there’ pieces of fiction and Like any avid reader; I’ve never regretted it. That’s to say that having gotten to the end of this write up, I almost feel curious to subject myself to all the thrills and feels of these titles again. Maybe one of them will make their way into my carry-on luggage as a post lockdown beach holiday read.