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OrpheusAgonistes -> RE: Obscure book recommendations... (6/7/2010 5:29:39 PM)
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quote:
This is a collection of short stories by Giovanni Boccaccio. I stumbled across a beautiful illustrated very old copy of this book years ago in a second hand book shop. I feel happy even just holding this book
Yeah, The Decameron is brilliant. Given how hugely influential the book was for generations of writers and intellectuals, it's weird how little regarded it seems to be today outside of very specific circles. Not sure which illustrated edition you have, but I've seen a couple that are staggeringly beautiful.
To the OP:
It's hard to say what's obscure and what isn't. Most of my friends are avid readers, and we tend to have tastes that flourish in the same hedgerow, so it's always hard to gauge what is and isn't well known outside of our constellation of cliques. A few, though, that I think may be a little obscure:
The Subject Steve by Sam Lipsyte. The book is, in a nutshell, about a patient who is diagnosed with a mysterious illness by a shadowy cabal of mysterious dudes in white coats who are adamant they are not doctors but who insist on diagnosing and trying to "cure" the patient anyway. It's a dazzlingly executed black comedy and a wonderfully savage satirical polemic wrapped into one. When I first read excerpts in a literary magazine in Chicago back in the early 21st century, I was convinced that when the book came out it was going to make Lipsyte into a household name (at least in hipster households). It should be noted that at that time I was also convinced that the track my band was working on, "The Comte de St Germain Stole My Girlfriend," was going to be a radio hit. Both predictions were equally true. But unlike our unlistenable sonic nonsense, Lipsyte's novel is actually a minor masterpiece.
Une Semaine de Bonte is a sort of graphic novel created by Max Ernst in the 30s, and composed of collages made from Victorian era illustrations. I actually just got around to buying a copy recently, and it's been everything I hoped for and more. It's disturbing, eerie, jarring, strangely sublime and uncomfortably sexy. Ernst is unapologetic in his treatment of themes of violence, sexuality, fanaticism, and oppression. What makes the work so intriguing to me, and so uncomfortable, is Ernst's ability to capture the seductive elements of the spectacle of savagery and oppression that was already in full swing in Europe at the time (if I remember, Ernst's own work had already been condemned, or would be condemned shortly afterward, by the Nazis). It's one thing to rail against the allure of nationalism, violence, and the lust for power but it's another to confront the reader with the fact that there is a seductive element to all of these vices and that it's the seduction, not the brute force, that is most dangerous in the end.
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Mautin is the last suggestion I have time for right now. It's the story of a brilliant scholar with sinister ambitions who sells his soul to live for an extra century and a half. The book is a chronicle of his adventures and works both backward (using frame stories to flesh out the cursed scholar's life and ambitions) and forward as he tries to find a schmuck willing to assume the obligations of his Mephistophelian Pact for him. This is another novel that was hugely influential in the horror genre but doesn't seem to be read very widely these days. It's an interesting bit of trivia that Mautin was Oscar Wilde's great uncle, and that when Wilde went into exile after prison he changed his name to Sebastian Melmoth, in honour of St. Sebastian and the titular character of this novel.
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