Recommend me some long and cluttered fiction

Cafe Society
1

I’m craving a particular type of reading experience right now, something that’s not really searchable in a few keywords, but I figure that the Dope’s collective wisdom and hundreds of years of fiction reading could help me out.

I have always loved the kinds of fiction that tends to make people impatient. For example, I adore Neal Stephenson’s longer works, which, according to others, should be edited down to half their size. I get a huge kick out of his digressions about Cap’n Crunch, elves and dwarves, heirloom furniture and stockings, pizza delivery, toilet paper, &c., and I almost don’t care whether the story goes anywhere, as long as the world stays fascinatingly textured and I get to read lots of interesting snippets about it.

Similarly, I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, not least for its hundreds of juicy footnotes, I love Vonnegut’s wanderings and rantings and commentaries, and my favorite parts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are the silly little asides and vignettes that can’t possibly be relevant to the rest of the story–until they suddenly, bizarrely, are.

Basically, I want to read something written by an extremely interesting person who loves to expound upon anything and everything, and can barely control him- or herself. I want to be dumped into the odds-and-ends drawer of some fascinating story, world, or situation. Genre isn’t terribly important, but I tend to like (post-)cyberpunkish science fiction, magic realism, surrealism, and crazy postmodern stuff. Plot (or lack thereof) is no object. I swear. I just need something cluttered, textured, meandering, and fascinating.

2

Get thee to the Discworld, friend!

3

It’s not a huge book, but I think you’d like The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. In addition to mimes and ninjas, the book had some interesting clutter, mostly about soulless corporations.

You might also like The Terror (the Franklin Expedition) and Drood (Dickens’ last unfinished novel and what it might have been about) by Dan Simmons (huge books, also with much meandering). Simmons is probably best known for the Hyperion books, and if you haven’t read those, they’d be right up your alley.

Oooh – Mark Helprin expounds mightily in Memoir from Antproof Case and A Soldier of the Great War.

Also textured and fascinating – Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

4

Well, it’s not fiction, but you might try The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. It’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the events leading up to the execution of Gary Gilmore, who murdered several people in Utah.

Now, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel is one of my favorite books, but The Executioner’s Song was too detailed even for me. If you want to know the life history of every character connected to the story in even the most minor way, this book is for you.

5

Long AND uncluttered? I’d say you were screwed, but I’m happy to be proven wrong, especially regarding SF without the Fantasy. From the fantastic, but ludicrous, miniseries I’ve seen, Bo may have one. Ludicrous trumps boring, humorlous, fantastic.

6

I’ll be sure to watch out for other people’s answers to this thread.

The first thing that came to mind when I read your OP was Haruki Murakami’s The Windup-Bird Chronicle. It definitely postmodern, hints of magical realism, presents a plot ( or lack thereof) that is very meandering and is pretty crazy.

7

I just finished this, and I quite liked it. I wouldn’t say it meanders as much as some of the other authors/books on the OPs list, but it was good and the jaunts it took were lovely both in and of themselves, and also for how they tied in to the overall plot.

While I really didn’t care for Johnathon Strange & Mr. Norell (I think it would have helped if there were a single likable character in the whole bloody thing :p), I do count Vonnegut and Adams as two of my very favoritiest authors. I think that you would also quite like Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) and most of John Irving’s works (A Prayer for Owen Meany, Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, A Widow for One Year - they’re all kinds of fantastic). Irving is a lot like Vonnegut (who I believe was one of his instructors at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop) in that he tends to reveal a character’s entire life story, even if it is just a small character who runs into the protagonist in the grocery store. It drives some people batty, but he does it in such a concise but respectful way that I love it - it really feels like you’re getting the entire world in this book, rather than just a moment in someone’s life.

8

Tristram Shandy?

9

One Hundred Years of Solitude?

10

Isn’t it the Ur-long-and-cluttered fiction? :wink:
ETA: I keep meaning to read it…

11

Roger Zelazny perhaps ? His Amber series would be a good start.

12

Avram Davidson’s novels aren’t all that long but are full of delightful digression. From a review of Vergil in Averno:

*The case of Avram Davidson offers a poignant example of what it is to be caught in the ebb tide of literary fashion. Davidson’s remarkable short stories — whimsical, erudite and often highly mannered — belong to a tradition that encompasses Saki, John Collier and Roald Dahl, one that embraces the fantastic and cultivates verbal and narrative extravagance. That the American short story has taken a different path is obvious to anyone who traces its course over the past 40 years, from the age of John O’Hara to that of Raymond Carver. Since the advent of high modernism 60 years ago, this other strain has been tolerated only from British writers — or, more recently and in a different way, in the phatmasmagoria of “magic realism.” For a writer of genuine talent to work with such unpopular forms has been to invite neglect.

The fantasy novel has attracted more attention in recent years, and despite the proliferation of shapeless sagas involving dragons and quests, a few novels have ventured to explore the grounds beyond realism with a measure of invention and artistry (John Crowley’s Little, Big is an outstanding example, as are the novels of Peter Beagle). In 1969 Avram Davidson published The Phoenix and the Mirror, a rich and ornate novel that has become a small classic, and which inaugurated a sequence that Vergil in Averno continues. Like its predecessor, Vergil in Averno focuses on a half-legendary figure and period: the life and era of Vergil Magus.*

Follow the link at the bottom of the page for a list of Davidson’s books. I’d recommend The Island Under the Earth, both Vergil books & both Peregrine novels–if you can find them. His SF isn’t as good, although *Clash of the Star Kings *is a delightful morsel. The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy is a collection that amounts to a novel. Also recommended: The Avram Davidson Treasury : A Tribute Collection and *The Other Nineteenth Century : A Story Collection by Avram Davidson. Containing Startling Revelations of the Lives of Literary Persons ; also, Truthful Accounts of Living Fossils, Montavarde’s Camera, The Irradiodiffusion Machine, and El Vilvoy de las Islas ; with Heinous Crimes, Noble Ladies in Adversity, Brilliant Detections, Imperial Eunuchs, Political Machinations, etc., etc. * Plus Adventures in Unhistory : Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends which isn’t fiction, exactly.

While you’re rooting around in the used book stores (or checking out Amazon & eBay) pick up anything you can find by Cordwainer Smith or R A Lafferty. Further details supplied on request.

13

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco comes to mind. I know it sounds a bit like Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” and its ilk, but it is better and earlier. I read a review of FC, and the opening salvo was “What can you say about a book whose plot starts on page 375?”

I had to get a copy just to find out if that was true.

It is.

You might also want to check out the works of John Crowley. His novel Little, Big is a microcosm of what is being asked for in the OP (a long one, but still a single novel), and his AEgypt cycle is an even more expansive example of that kind of writing. One of my favorite writers, he is.

14

Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins

15

If I remember correctly, Perdido Street Station goes on many tangents. Not sure if you like Steampunk/Fantasy, though.

16

I’ve picked up Peter Esterházy’s Harmonia Caelestis for summer reading, and I can safely say that it’s long, cluttered and convoluted. It also lacks plot and chronology (is it a commentary on the Austro-Hungarian empire, on Hungarian Communism, a family history (or rather a family ahistory), or an Oedipus complex?), and is constructed in numbered paragraphs rather than chapters.

17

Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. They aren’t cyberpunk, but the man did love to expound.

Also, while it’s short, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth.

18

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
A rather different setting from the previous books but it definitely counts as long and cluttered but in a good way IMO. It’s set in North India in the 1950’s and as the name suggests it’s about a family looking for a husband for their daughter. But there are numerous digressions which Seth handles with aplomb: the politics of land-reform, the shoe-making business, Hindustani classical music, departmental politics at a university, Hindu-Muslim tensions . If you are at all curious about India it should be a good read.

19

It’s not the genre you mentioned, but *The Crimson Petal and the White * by Michel Faber is a sprawling historical novel (late 19th century London) that is wickedly funny and incredibly readable. It’s not a genre that I read a lot, tending more to the fantasy/sf, but I ate this up.

20

Gene Wolfe. *Definitely *Gene Wolfe.

His stories barely have plots, just events happening one more-or-less after another, with plot strands dropped for entire volumes and then picked up with no warning - or maybe never picked up at all - and digressions that last for entire chapters. How many writers would dedicate 30 pages to a character reading a children’s tale, with no bearing whatsoever to the story - and do it twice?

The Book of the New Sun, a tale of a wandering executioner in the very distant future is his best, but if you really want rambling frustration, try Latro in the Mist. It’s the story of a Roman soldier with short-term memory loss, told in the first person, and reading it will make you feel like you’re going insane.