I’m the first one to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs *Barsoom *novels? ERB writes them as if John Carter was his uncle, and left this strange manuscript in his care, asking that it not be brought to light until so many years have passed, and now they have, so here it is.
ETA: The movie uses the same device.
If this were an Evil!Skald thread, wouldn’t you be dead–or, at a minimum, tied to a chair while a Monica-Bellucci model slapbot beat the living hell out of you?
I give Bilbo credit for writing a quarter of LotR (not counting the appendices, which are clearly the work of Gondorian scholars and of Tolkien himself. 
). By the time Frodo and company got back to Imladris, the greatest of hobbits was doddering and not up to much. He’d clearly composed Book I based on his interviews of Frodo, the three youngsters, Aragorn, and Gandalf before the Council of Elrond, but not the other three books.
Oh, and Merry clearly contributed to the Prologue, as the bit about leaf makes clear.
Would Lolita qualify? The book itself is introduced with a foreword by the fictional “John Ray Jr., Ph.D” who tells the reader that the author of the manuscript died of heart failure while awaiting trial. So, the manuscript of Lolita is written by the person who identifies himself as “Humbert Humbert” (a pseudonym he chose for himself) in the novel.
Lolita definitely qualifies. One of the elements of the technique, I would say, is the author pretending (in the text) to be only a a literary agent.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written in a similar fashion, from the perspective of an iced in explorer, if I recall correctly.
Guess I’ll admit to reading it: most of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a supposed “secret diary” kept by Abe, finally passed on to the author, and Now The Story Can Be Told.
I read it, and I’m proud!
House on the Borderland is a story wherein two guys purportedly find a book, and most of it is the reading of that book. I don’t know if the false document aspect is well or poorly done, but I hated the book.
And I dislike how many stories wrap up explaining how all other evidence got destroyed, when it’s so clear and tacked on. Hide your technique, writers.
Wow, I felt sure all of mine would be mentioned by now, and only one was.
Burroughs’ Barsoom stories are already mentioned.
Add to that:
Did anyone mention 20,000 Leagues? It’s written as a diary, I think.
Laurie R King writes a series about an aged Sherlock Holmes and his young American feminist Jewish wife (yeah, I know, but it actually mostly works for me) that are presented in the books and in publicity (even on Twitter) as if King is a ‘ghostwriter’ for Mary Russell’s original diary-like manuscripts of their adventures. There are even moments when Russell notes with bemusement that Holmes is considered fictional, and that must make her even more-so.
House of Leaves and the companion text The Whalestoe Letters are pretty much straight-up false documents, and shitloads of them as well.
The more recent S by JJ Abrams is supported by loads of ‘artifacts’ like ticket stubs and scribbled-upon napkins and etc. (fucker was a bitch to catalog between the inital name and the associated loose crap.)
I don’t have a copy to hand, but I’m pretty sure Alas Babylon is written as a diary or memoir of one of the survivors.
For a fun kids’ addition to the list, the Dinotopia series are written this way, with inserts of ‘scientific illustrations’ and marginalia and the overall conceit that the contents were recovered from a scientist’s field journal.
And reaching way the hell back in time, we have Herland, a feminist, communist utopia, and The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, a really creepy (and tedius as hell) far future lovecraftian nightmare. Both of those are written as memoirs or recollections of the viewpoint characters.
And that is all I can think of offhand, but I’m sure there are more.
I know the film Bridges of Madison County takes the form of a woman’s diary being found and read by her kids after her death. Does the book use the same approach?
I do and it isn’t.
Time for more ginko biloba!
Damn, I read too many books to even try. I should know better.
However I do remember reading a post-nuclear story in memoir form. Wonder which one it was…
War Day, perhaps?
Another example: The original novel of The Planet of the Apes. It starts with a futuristic couple out for a cruise in their space ship. They happen across a manuscript in a bottle floating in space. The bulk of the novel is that manuscript, telling the familiar tale of the human astronauts landing on a monkey planet. The very end of the book is the couple, finishing the manuscript, and scoffing at it as impossible. The kicker is that
the couple are intelligent chimps, which we don’t find out until the very end
Um, wait, what does one do that ends up with the Belluci slapbot? I, um, just want to make sure I avoid it, you understand.
Bring on the slapbot!
Cloverfield is the footage from a found camcorder.
HP Lovecraft story about an astronaut trapped on Mars(?). Nope, Venus. In the Walls of Eryx.
This is a good example. The novel is composed entirely of letters, diary entries, and so on, with brief explanatory notes for each document. It purports to be the evidence submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions in England, in support of bringing a murder charge.
I think the only narrative is a short paragraph at the end, giving a glimpse of the DPP’s thoughts as he considers whether to authorise the charge.
Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige is made up of diaries, interspersed with present-day events. Christopher Nolan made one of his famously complex movies from the novel in 2006 (from a screenplay he wrote with brother Jonathan), in an attempt to translate the diaries device into visual form.
Yeah, but that’s kind of the inverse of the OP’s “fictional narrative purports to be the retelling of actual events which its author is relating in a form other than that of deliberate fiction” because the authors aren’t saying, “Here’s some stuff I found that was recorded. I present it to you, the reader.” Instead, they’re saying, “Here’s some events I saw/experienced first-hand.” and the fact that we know now that they weren’t even alive when the events allegedly occurred doesn’t change the fact that they are claiming to have been there and recorded it in real-time. [Am I rambling or unclear here?] The authors are telling us, “I really saw this happen” rather than “I found this account of what someone else saw happen.” And King James’ staff ostensibly is only translating the firsthand accounts into plain English, without changing a thing.
T2 does this, as well, in both the theatrical and special editions.
The end of Natural Born Killers seems to imply we were watching a lot of stuff that the cameraman recorded earlier while documenting the crime and biography of the killers.
If I recall correctly, most of the original Never Ending Story is about what the kid is reading in the book he was given.
I’m not quite sure, but does The Help qualify for this type of presentation technique? ‘The Help was a groundbreaking book; here’s how it came about…’
Speaking of Emma Stone, how about Easy A which is us watching her web-cam recorded explanation of what led up to the stuff we see at the end.
How about the first (McGuire/Dunst) Spiderman? “It all began because I wanted a car to impress a girl…”
Speaking of which…doesn’t The Notebook qualify?
James Garner goes to a care facility to spend the day reading a dramatic and romantic tale from a notebook to a woman with Alzheimers-related memory loss. At the end she remembers that it’s their life story; he promises to come back next week to read it (yet) again.
Jumping to TV:
Weren’t some of the episodes in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles using this device?
Babylon 5: In the Beginning has us watching as Emperor Mollare is telling the kids a story – of how the Earth/Minbare War began (and ended).
Hmm…aren’t we watching the director’s depiction of the singer’s narrative about Jed Clampett during the opening credits for The Beverly Hillbillies?
—G!
Let me tell you all a story
'bout a man named Charlie
on a tragic and fateful day
…–The Kingston Trio
…Charlie on the M.T.A.
Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mystery novels take this angle, with narrator Archie Goodwin ‘writing’ the books, a fact he mentions a few times throughout the seventy some-odd tales (between novels and novellas). It’s highly successful because unlike the Holmes/Waltson dynamic, Archie admires but isn’t in awe of the great detective whose tales he’s chronicling, and in fact I’d say Archie is at least 50% the protagonist versus Watson’s nature as an observer (albeit an involved one) to Holmes’s genius.
Archie’s pretty snarky about Wolfe’s foibles, which is refreshing. I don’t recall him ever mentioning whether Wolfe himself read the books–but knowing Archie, he wouldn’t write any more deferentially if he knew Wolfe would be reading. (Actually, I’m now remembering something about Archie giving Wolfe a compliment and writing as an aside something like, “I won’t say any more just in case he reads this; his head is fat enough.”)
Sometimes he mentions getting letters from people who read the narratives, and now and then later clients (I’m thinking of their original client in Prisoner’s Base in particular) reveal how thrilled they are to see the famous office Archie’s described in the books.
He also has a couple of forewards, depending on the circumstances, where he issues a disclaimer. In The Black Mountain, “Archie” warns that in many ways, this book is a phony, because so much of it took place within Montenegro, with dialogue taking place in a language Archie doesn’t speak. So he had to get it translated by either Wolfe or a language course.
Another method he uses is at the end of a couple of cases, implying that he might not publish the book at all depending on certain events. Something like, “The case is still pending and for all I know, this may never see print. If you’re reading it, s/he was found guilty. If not, it’s been stuck in a drawer and that’ll be the end to it.”
Archie makes an unreliable narrator to some extent, because very rarely–to maintain suspense–he keeps certain assignments from Wolfe a secret, or at least fairly obscure, until they’re already in play (now I’m thinking of The Doorbell Rang, my personal favorite of the corpus). Other times, he cheerfully admits leaving some more realistic (i.e. cursing) dialogue out because a middle-aged schoolteacher in the midwest “might read this and chastize me” (or words to that effect).
Anyhoo, that’s how things stand in the Wolfe series.
Another epistolary novel would be Les Liaisons Dangereuses, fairly famously told via letters. I’m trying to decide whether the Edmund Crispin mysteries starring Oxford professor/genius Gervase Fen would count in this. It’s difficult because they might simply be fourth-wall breaking. Fen seems to either be a) fully aware that he’s having his events chronicled by the author, or more surreally b) conscious that he’s a character in a book.
I use as an example his exploits in The Moving Toyshop. One scene has Fen and a new friend (the book’s primary POV character) attacked and knocked out for a while. When the POV character wakes up, he hears Fen reciting things like “The Blood on the Mortarboard, Fen Strikes Back, A Don for Death…” After a while, the friend asks groggily what the hell Fen is talking about. Fen says in his usual insouciant way that he’s been spending his time “thinking up titles for Crispin.” So he knows his exploits will be recounted by author Edmund Crispin; it’s not clear whether this is because he’s aware he’s fictional, or whether Crispin is just his writing agent/publisher.
It’s a great series, by the way. Very charming, especially if you enjoy that kind of meta humor.