Dhalgren in Queereaders

Jul 07, 2018 Megan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: ontological-madness, experimental, queer, scifi, crime, disability, masculinity-studies, on-writing, madness, mental-illness

Read over three+ months in an online reading group with former book club co-runner Liza. So yes, five stars, this is sui generis, an amazingly full text, rich with philosophy and sociology, linguistics and aesthetics, plus scatology, dirty sex, the body on every page. Anti-epiphanic, circular. A novel about a city outside of social codes and the law, including natural/astronomical law: the urban geography shifts; there are two moons. Very much interested in the replication of mythology, in anarc ...more

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Feb 15, 2008 David rated it it was amazing

The great gay hippie masterpiece. A vision of urban life as an alternate universe. Seductive. Drug-like. Perfect.

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Nov 11, 2016 Agnieszka rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative-fiction

I wrote this review while I was halfway through the book. Now that I've finished it, I think it's perfectly appropriate to post it as my review.

I'll add one important thing: this book changed me. It opened me to a new way of interacting with strangers, especially strangers who are on the fringes of normal society. It made me a braver, better person.

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I've been reading Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren since February, with interruptions for other books, because I have found it so hard to get into. Some I wrote this review while I was halfway through the book. Now that I've finished it, I think it's perfectly appropriate to post it as my review.

I'll add one important thing: this book changed me. It opened me to a new way of interacting with strangers, especially strangers who are on the fringes of normal society. It made me a braver, better person.

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I've been reading Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren since February, with interruptions for other books, because I have found it so hard to get into. Somewhere around page 150 or 200, I started finding it incredibly compelling. Now, I can't seem to put it down. I couldn't really tell you what it's about, except that it takes place in a city where an unspecified disaster has taken place, and everyone lives in a kind of cluster of self-formed communities of different types, money's no good, clocks don't work, there are two moons, and geography won't stay put, and it's possible that the close point of view character is insane and that's why the scenery is so unstable. He's also a poet and there's a lot of really funny insider baseball about poets and poetry communities and the mental state of creativity.

It's possible the only reason I'm able to put up with the weird structure and loose level of sense this book makes because I've read a bunch of Joanna Russ' experimental work lately. (I think they might have been friends? Certainly they seem to have influenced each other. One of the characters has a book by Joanna Russ on his bookshelf) There's lots and lots of really explicit sex, but it's not erotic. At least it's less disturbing that the sex in Gravity's Rainbow (so far).

Dhalgren confronts race, sexuality, and class in ways that I haven't seen in other science fiction. It's not preachy and it's not easy. It feels like wading into a real tense situation. Actually, it reminds me of Repo Man a little bit, too.

I'm 300 pages in (out of 800) and I sort of want to tell everyone to read it, but also I know it's the kind of book that might just bore or frustrate a lot of people who like such things as plot and sense. I think there is a story, but it's more of a mood than a plot. Anyway, it's a challenging book, and definitely not a light read. ...more

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