Frank Norris, who wrote “McTeague” (adapted as the film “Greed” by Eric Von Stroheim), was a great Naturalist writer.
But Norris died too young, and Theodore Dreiser lived too long, so readers of Naturalism have to be subjected to Dreiser’s descriptions of every ashcan, pushcart and storefront on Clark Street in 1890’s Chicago.
…or they can put Dreiser down and go for the post-Naturalism Naturalism of Nelson Algren!
The descriptions of every ashcan, pushcart and storefront on Division Street in 1940s Chicago in The Man with the Golden Arm are very tasty indeed.
Silverlock, by John Myers Myers is out of print but well worth hunting down. The protagonist is a young cynic, P. Clarance Shandon, who falls overboard mid-ocean and is washed up on a large island known as The Commonwealth, which turns out to be the commonwealth of literture and mythology.
Among his adventures, he encounters Robin Hood, Orpheus, the Great White Whale, the Ancient Mariner (complete with albatross) the Cardiff Giant, Puck, Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Xanadu, Alistair Crowley’s “Hellfire Club,” a ship of fools, a one-eyed man accompanied by two crows, and other heroes, archtypes and storied locations, from Gitche Gumee to Thebes, to the Red Branch to Angel’s Camp.
No matter how well read or how much a polymath, Myers stuffs so many cleverly woven-in allusions that you WILL have to look many of them up.
Oh, and it helps that Myers’ plotting scoots the story right along. An epic romp, indeed.
Bradbury certainly did read it – he edited the paperback anthology it was published in. This book isn’t so obscure, though. It’s been published in paperback at least a half dozen times in my lifetime, and a pretty famous movie was liberally adapted from it in the early 1960s by George Pal, with screenplay by Charles Beaumont, starring Tony Randall and a lot of other famous folk.
Harold Frederic is also considered an early naturalist writer, and was a contemporary of Norris. Frederic died in 1898 at the age of 42, while Norris died in 1902 a the age of 32. Stephen Crane, another naturalist, died in 1900 at the age of 28. Pretty strange how those early naturalists conked out early.
scribbles down the names of several posted titles to add to the reading list
All in all, some excellent cites. I’m not sure ORLANDO FURIOSO qualifies as a neglected masterpiece, though. It’s pretty well known. Same goes for TALE OF THE GENJI.
THE HOLE IN THE ZERO sounds good in a Samuel R. Delaney-ish way. I’ll probably pick that one up.
All three of the books I’ve mentioned have been reprinted, btw. Hats off to Dave Eggers’ amazing “McSweeney’s” imprint who discovered and reprinted ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE. Their site is well worth checking out. It’s devoted readers like these that have saved books like THE LORD OF THE RINGS from languishing in obscurity and remaindered boxes.
am searching for a book whose title and author i cannot remember…
4 main characters were ROSEMARY and JASPAR, who are cousins, and SELINA and her cousin who i cant remember.
they have to deal with this baddy the ‘DOPPELGANGER’ who has taken the appearance of some dude with very strong magic powers who lived in the mountains with his wife (who can turn into a swan) and his young son (who can turn into any animal).
the doppelganger gains strenth by draining the power of others, and is after the young boy because his powerd are immense and worth sucking out.
there’s a kidnapping, a seige at MOOTMEET, and a happy ending.
anyone?
Some of my un(re)discovered favorites:
Sorrows of a Show Girl (1908) by Kenneth McGaffey. Hilarious series of “interviews” with a slangy, wisecracking New York showgirl; sort of a precursor to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Predestined: A Novel of New York Life (1910) by Stephen French Whitman. Marvelously depressing tale of a man who fails at everything. A real wrist-slasher, this one.
Show Girl (1928) and Hollywood Girl (1929), by J.P. McEvoy. More hilarious doings of showgirls (you can tell my elevated taste in literature, yes?). Dark and bitter and very funny.
The Fox of Maulen by Hans Helmut Kirst is my nomination.
It’s a viciously funny satire set in eastern Germany between 1933 and 1945. Filled with memorable characters, it charts one village’s descent into Fascism. Hans Materna is one of the noblest figures in ywentieth century literature IMHO. The novel starts wiht the murder of his eldest son, leading him to become the sworn enemy of the local party bosses. Hilarity ensues.
Can we nominate foreign books that most Americans* don’t know about?
If so, I nominate Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra. It’s a French Caribbean novel about two women: Helene, who finds a diary as she’s preparing to get married, and Juletane, the woman who wrote the diary. Juletane is a Caribbean woman raised in France who marries an African man and goes to live with him in his home country. There she discovers that she’s actually his second wife, which begins her struggle to cope with the strict Muslim culture in her new home.
Runner-up: The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwartz-Bart.
*This moment of nationality brought to you by the fact that I don’t know what’s canon in other countries.
Enjoying this thread, Adam P. looking forward to chasing some of these down.
My nomination has got to be You Can’t Win by Jack Black - no, not the guy from High Fidelity, Shallow Hal or Tenacious D - a lifetime hobo/criminal who ended up reforming and working in the San Franciso Library and wrote his memoirs. Hailed by William Burroughs (not that I particularly like his stuff) and considered a real-life hard-boiled story, the book is very accessible and a fascinating glimpse into the life of the underclass at the time.
And while Dashiell Hammett is regarded more highly now than ever, most folks haven 't read his stuff - if you haven’t read Red Harvest you really don’t know what you’re missing in the hard-boiled canon…
Nothing is wrong with your comma usage, but this is kind of a fun site.
Forgotten literary masterpieces- I’m a huge fan of Christopher Smart myself. I guess he’s really getting a lot of recognition though.
Before you all run to your nearest used bookstores, I recommend you check here for some of the novels mentioned: Project Gutenberg
It is a completely free site, and after a customary search, Orlando Furioso is listed in Italian and English.
Enjoy!
I’m very fond of the books of S.J. Perelman, the other other New Yorker humorist (after Thurber and Benchley), especially Acres and Pains, the classic story of the unpleasantness that is home ownership. Perelman wrote in a heavily allusive style, filled with puns and other wordplay, that can seem odd when you first encounter it (especially if you don’t get the references). But I find him laugh-out-loud funny most of the time, even when I’m not sure which mid-30s marketing campaign he’s making fun of, specifically.
Frank Norris’s McTeague is a great novel from the turn of the last century that doesn’t seem to be much read outside of academia these days. (It might be slightly better known as the source of Eric Von Stroheim’s legendary lost/butchered movie Greed.) It’s the story of a dim-witted San Francisco dentist and his shrewish wife, written in a style you’d swear was post-Hemingway and Hammett: cold, unaffected, detached and precise. It’s a novel in which unpleasant things happen, but it’s never unpleasant to read.
Perfume
by Patrik Suskind
Well, I dont feel like writing much of a summary about it because I feel most of you guys wont bother reading it anyways. I just have to say its my favourite novel and it involves a person with a superhuman sense of smell. Plus its set in 14th century France.
Awesome.
I’m definitely going to have to track some of these titles down; they certainly sound appealing. My entries:
Second Skin by John Hawkes (1962); a postmodern/black comedy/gothic tale/psychological character study of a shmuck identified only as Skipper, who seems destined to bear the weight of the world’s sorrows.
The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning (1929). Praised by Hemingway, much of the dialouge was considered obscene at the time (the words bloody and f*** being a vital part of the characters’ vocabulary), and so the book was “sanitized” for public consumption for the better part of 50 years. Ties with All Quiet on the Western Front as the best book about men at war, imo.
It’s weird talking about this stiuff while there’s a war raging but… hey.
I just wanted to jump in and tell you that your description peaked my interest and I plan on tracking this book down. Based on the Amazon description, it sounds like it has the same quality of weirdness that I like in authors like Aimee Bender, Flann O’Brien and Barry Yougrau. Definitely sounds like it fits the “bizarre and weird” parameters I mentioned earlier.
I think I’ll withdraw my earlier pick–MY SECRET LIFE by Anonymous. Though fascinating, the book isn’t very well written and so really falls under a “Literary Curiousities” rubric rather than “forgotten/obscure masterpieces of literature”. Literary curiousities --which could be a whole other thread by the way–are books like THE SARGASSO MANUSCRIPT (can’t remember author), THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY by Robert Burton, or MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS BY Daniel Paul Schreber. Books that are not neccesarily well-written but are compellingly bizarre. They also elude rigid categories such as fiction/non-fiction. When the schizophrenic Schreber tells us that his nervous system has been tranfsormed into a conduit for the word of god who’s to say wheter it’s “true” or not?
The French historian/philosopher Michel Foucault loved tracking down stuff like this. Two gems he found in the archives of the Bibliotheque Nationale are
–I, PIERRE RIVIERE, HAVING KILLED MY MOTHER, MY SISTER, AND MY BROTHER… This was written in the 19th century by an unusually bright teenager who killed his entire family with an axe. As with Lizzie Borden, he seems to have been an apparently well adjusted kid who one day just exploded. The descriptions of the murders are chilling and the book is full of the young writer’s quirky sense of humor. He was executed not long after it was written. The last section contains an excellent essay on Riviere by Foucault. This book was later made into a movie. Foucault played the judge.
–HERCULINE BARBIN: THE MEMOIRS OF A FRENCH HERMAPHRODITE Fascinating memoir by a 19th century French hermaphrodite who penned this book as her/his suicide note.
Inspired Jeffrey Eugenides’ recent novel MIDDLESEX.
Both of these can be found in the Philosophy section of most bookstores.
Oh, and Eve, I’m looking into PREDESTINED. Sounds good.
Wow. I’m impressed. I was going to suggest Ubik by P.K. Dick, but that’s probably not obscure in general and definitely not with this crowd.
Same with a favorite of mine that, while not obscure, was a mite strange -> “A Canticle for Leibowitz.”
Since you mentioned Jim Thompson, Adam, I’d like to recommend *** A Swell-Looking Babe *** again. Often overlooked by fans of his more popular novels, this is Thompson at his pulpiest, but he still produces a complex character study about a bellhop whose father was ruined in the red scare.
I don’t know if John Gardner is forgotten or overlooked or not (he isn’t around here), but *** Grendel***, the Beowulf story from the monster’s point of view, and *** Mickelsson’s Ghosts***, about a philosophy professor coming unglued, are defintiely worth the effort.
Also, since the season is almost upon us, how about *** Ninety Two in the Shade, ***by Thomas McGuane. More on men, violent rivalry, and fishing.
I’m ressurecting this thread since I have a few new discoveries to share.
First, there’s EDGAR SALTUS, a late 19th/early 20th century author whose books can be charcterized as a kind of hallucinatory reimagining of real historical events, the more sick and bizarre the better. One doesn’t read him for an accurate account of these events, but for the exquisite, dream-like quality of his prose and the obvious pleasure he takes in meticulously describing the most infamous and sadistic acts of figures like Nero and Caligula. His best known books include works on Caligula, Helioglabulus, and, his masterpiece, a book on the Russian czars entitled THE IMPERIAL ORGY. Again, these are NOT works of historiography and shouldn’t be taken as such. A good article on Saltus:
http://www.absinthe-literary-review.com/archives/fierce7.htm
Next is XAVIER DEMAISTRE, the late-18th century author of one of the weirdest auto-biographies in all literature: VOYAGE AROUND MY ROOM.
More recently, there’s MICHEL TOUSSAINT’s novel, THE BATHROOM, translated form the French a couple of years ago. The hero of this book spends his entire life in his bathtub. This might not seem the most gripping kind of read but Toussaint follows the premise in all sorts of unexpected directions and the book becomes a kind of extended philosophical riff on Blaise Pascal’s famous dictum that “All the world’s troubles come from people not knowing how to stay quietly in their room.” This book is slightly difficult to find.
Also:
WALTER DE LA MARE: MEMOIRS OF A MIDGET. Self-explanatory. Bizarre early 20th century novel periodically re-discovered. Authors like Harry Matthews and Paul Auster swear by this book.
Anybody who has others to add is welcome to do so. Basically, the only criteria is that the books be weird and marginalized in their own time.