Customer Reviews

DHALGREN (Dhalgren -- in German)

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I read this book in three days, found none of the sex gratuitous, never felt lost (though the narrative certainly does fly apart in the last section), and thought the book, if it needed editing, only needed about 75 pages worth, and that's spread out across 800. I seem to be in the minority, and that makes sense--this is not a book for everyone.

But for me, Dhalgren is the best book I've read in months, and I desperately don't want its detractors to scare people like me off. No, fans of early Delany, this is not Babel-17, but I personally think he didn't start getting really good until Nova and his short stories. No, people of delicate sensibilities, this is not a sanitized book, but those who believe it's _just_ about the author's own bisexuality are probably betraying their own sensitivities; frankly, I found issues of race, the concept of identity, the artistic drive, philosophy, the power of myth, semiotics, metafiction, and the overwhelming theme of "What happens when time has no meaning?" to be far more prevalent than the issues of sexuality. There _is_ a lot of sex in certain sections of Dhalgren, but it usually serves as a signpost in a relationship, showing just how two or more people stand at that particular moment. Dhalgren is also not "about nothing," nor is it "disjointed"--there is very clearly a storyline going on, though its initial stated goals lose meaning as certain themes start to take over the universe of the book. It's no A-to-B plot, but it's one seriously good A-through-B-and-around-back-to-A (or IS it?) plot.

So what IS Dhalgren? To me, it's a book with all of the best thematic concerns of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow combined with a few very awesome riffs on Joyce, universalized by the sheer mythic BIGNESS of this very, very weird place in which it all occurs. Fans of the Big Dense Postmodern Novel and SF's '60s New Wave might fall madly in love with this, as might anyone who likes both Haruki Murakami and Hunter Thompson. I know I did.

Plenty of people have tried to summarize this thing, but this is what you need to know: Dhalgren is an eerie, sexy, alternately thrilling and draining, mythic picaresque of a book in which one very confused guy enters the weirdest place on earth and ends up at the center of everything through no fault of his own. The desperate search for knowledge comes up with tantalizing clues and some emotionally walloping encounters and relationships with other people, but the Kid's mind is his own worst enemy, and the nearly self-aware city seems not too far behind. By the end, the Kid might not even care, but that doesn't free him from the troubles not knowing causes. Plenty of possible answers pop up, but this mystery's solution seems overdetermined: there are dozens of ways to explain what's going on, but each one has just as much tantalizing evidence as the others, and none fit the whole story perfectly. This is a book where you're going to want to flip back a lot to find out what the Kid is having frustrating bits of deja vu over, and like Finnegans Wake, you're also going to want to read the first couple of chapters over again as soon as you get to the broken sentence that ends and begins the book, because just like in Joyce's most frustrating creation, the end enriches the beginning INFINITELY.

I'm already itching to reread this thing, because I have the feeling that the entire novel glows with interconnections the second time through. Till then, though, I beg anyone excited rather than scared off by this review to purchase this immediately. The risk of disliking Dhalgren greatly is far outweighed by the rewards the right kind of reader gets out of this book. This one's now a part of my mental constellation, and I hope it can play the same part in yours.

I just finished Dhalgren a few hours ago and I am still thinking it through, so maybe this review is a bit premature, but here goes:

I'd heard about this book for ages, so I was excited when it got reissued recently. Being a big Pynchon/Joyce fan, I have much patience and love for the so-called Big Difficult Novel. Not being a big SF fan, I was more intrigued by the book's titanic reputation as a surreal masterwork. However, right now I disagree with the notion (from previous reviewers) that this book is an absolute love or an absolute hate, as there is so much in it to recommend, as well as some basic things to criticize. Hence, my three stars.

Well, in so many ways this book is certainly fantastic. It has imagery I've never read anywhere else, and having grown up in a formerly industrial New England city that is only now coming out of it's crumbling, chaotic doldrums, I related to many images of Bellona. Overall, I think the book is a grand project of metafiction, portraiture of mental illness, or some inexplicable religious/apocalyptic mystery. The fact that it works on all those levels makes me admire the novel more. I did not need anything explicitly explained, as I liked feeling the confusion and whirl of ideas that the main character feels. (If you've seen the movie "Memento," the experience is similar.)

What I did not admire was the fact that the book was easily 200 pages too long. For example, I'm hardly squeamish about descriptions of sex, but after dozens and dozens of them...well, like any cheap pornography, it gets kind of numbingly dull--which may be the point, but hey, I got bored. Furthermore, many scenes of gang life absolutely serve no purpose but are merely mundane--and while that may be the point too, it leaves the reader (or maybe just me) feeling like such writing was flabby and flat. So even if these certain elements served a point--for metafiction, for depiction of mental illness--they still come off as bad reading. While cutting 200 pages would rob the reader of some fantastic scenes and images, I really think that a shorter work would have made this haunting novel even more powerful than it is. Therefore, be careful who you recommend the book to, not because of the sex scenes or anything, but because some people may find it too much of a slog.

That being said, my mind is still racing through all the possibilities and characters and images of the novel (the red eyes, the shifting streets, the frighteningly delusional Richards family's attempts at middle-class order), and it's quite refreshing to read something that makes me think hard. I think the book also influenced some of my dreams, which was not always pleasant, but showed how effective much of the book is. So hey, maybe if I were to write this review a week from now, I might give it four stars.

At last, at long last, I have finished Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, and here are my thoughts, enhanced by some quotes from William Gibson's foreword to the book.

Dhalgren is not a book for everyone; in fact, I'd even go so far as to say it's not for most people. Delany's work is definitely influenced by the fact that he is a gay black man, so if you're expecting normal sexual and emotional relationships, look elsewhere. It's also a dense book, which your average Grisham- or Crichton-reading person is not going to get, or even want to get. It's also long and slower-paced than most books I've read.

That said, it's also one of the most fascinating tales I've read to date. I have sincere worries I'll ever be able to look at, say, a Philip K. Dick book with quite as much reverence again.

It is a labyrinthine book, a sort of wandering narrative that somehow stays carefully focused as the tale weaves continually through its long tale. In his foreword, William Gibson said, "I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it. This has never caused me the least discomfort, or interfered in any way with my pleasure in the text. If anything, the opposite has been true."

When I read those words before starting the text, I had my doubts, along with a few lofty - but misplaced - ambitions. How, I wondered, could you not "get" a book, yet still enjoy it? "Maybe I can figure its mystery out," I said to myself. How foolish I was.

In re-reading the foreword after finishing the book, I see now that Gibson was absolutely right. "Dhalgren," he says, "is not there to be finally understood." This is absolutely correct; the nature of the city and the events that occur within it are part of the story, but are not the point. The point of the story is the story; it is one of the few works I have read that justifies itself simply by reading through it.

Gibson also describes in his foreword how reading Dhalgren strips the reader of many of the things that readers often consider to be their fundamental rights as readers, because it refuses to deliver itself unto the reader in the typical question/reward fashion. "If this is a quest, the reader protests, then we must learn the object of that quest. If this is a mystery, we must be told at least the nature of the puzzle. And Dhalgren does not answer."

This, too, is true. This may sound strange, but there is simply no way to put into words how this book can be so unconventional, so unyielding of its secrets to the reader, and yet so thoroughly enjoyable.

And the strange thing about this book is that even though it is long and has no overt "point", even though it does not deliver insights on what will happen next, even though it took me over four months to read, I loved it. It feels good to have finished this book, as though I took the ride with Kid and Lanya and all the rest. It's a journey I won't soon forget. And if you're just the right kind of reader, you won't, either.

I just finished rereading Dahlgren for the first time in 25 years. Man, have I changed! I had a much different reading experience at the age of 45 than I did at the age of 20! A couple of the reviews here are (almost) helpful; but I empathically feel that the prospective buyer may wish to know a little bit more. In short, if you are genuinely intelligent, then you will enjoy this novel; if you go through life pretending to be intelligent, then you will hate it (you will probably become very ANGRY). Forget the fact that this novel does NOT have a plot (in the ordinary sense)! Delany's brilliant writing has created some of the most memorable and believable characters in the history of science fiction! I know of few other writers (read that: "artists") who've so successfully created an experience that places the reader inside the mind of mentally ill person. Brilliant! The entire novel takes place inside of a surreal city where inexplicable things happen: do not try explaining the inexplicable; you will only frustrate yourself. (The setting reminds me a little of Tarkovski's "Stalker.") Now a little history lesson: Samuel R. (aka, "Chip") Delany (nephew of the famous Delany Sisters, I hear) burst upon the science fiction scene in the early sixties and quickly became (arguably) the best science fiction writer in America. Delany could CREATE more original ideas in ten pages than other sci-fi writers could produce in an entire novel! (Read his short stories in the Driftglass collection if you want proof!) When I was reading his books back in the late sixties and early seventies, I got this notion that he was out in the world LIVING life, while other sci-fi writers were hiding away from the world (escaping into their loner self-delusions). Scores of lesser writers have made whole careers from copying Delany's original ideas and style; but Delany is The First, The Original. Read him! If you are new to Delany, then I highly recommend that you read several of his other works BEFORE you read Dahlgren. Delany won back-to-back Nebula Awards for Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. Read them! He should have won a third Nebula for Nova (at least it was nominated for a Hugo; but they probably felt it was someone else's turn to win). Read it! In "The Fall of the Towers" trilogy (written between 1961 and 1964), Delany has a plot element involving soldiers who are unknowingly fighting a war in virtual reality (20 years before Gibson's Neuromancer and 30 years before the Matrix!). And now for Dahlgren. After reaching the top of his profession as a sci-fi writer in 1968 (at the tender age of only 26!), Delany seemed to turn his back on sci-fi. Although he has denied this in interviews, I have a notion that Delany wanted to become a writer of Great Literature, not just a writer in the lesser genre of sci-fi. (I personally believe that Delany was frustrated that his writing talents had exceeded the reading talents of the sci-fi fans.) And then came Dahlgren. Dahlgren begins and ends in the same style as Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (the end cycles us back to the beginning); perhaps this is Delany's way of telling us something about this novel. As other reviewers have mentioned, Dahlgren does not have a common plot; nothing is explained; there is no resolution. In my mind, this novel is entirely abstract: don't look for crystalline explanations; look for the METAPHOR! Also, this is NOT really a sci-fi book; it is Delany telling you about scenes from his real life (I believe). If you have read Delany's autobiographical book Heavenly Breakfast, then you might suspect that Dahlgren was drawn from Delany's journals from 1969 to 1973. Eighty percent of this novel could easily have been published as a period-piece from that era. In Dahlgren, we are not so much reading about the main character (a native American half-bread named The Kidd) as we are reading about Delany himself (an urban bisexual black man living in a 70s commune with a bunch of characters whose sole purpose in life is getting balled and high). In one scene in the novel, Kidd looks in a mirror and sees not his own reflection, but the image of his creator (the author, that is). And then there is the famous notebook that The Kidd finds at the beginning of the novel: a notebook (obvious dropped by the author who invented Kidd!) that describes incidents in Kidd's life before they happen. (Reminds me of Breakfast of Champions.) And who the HELL is William Dahlgren! ;-) My only complaint: Delany needed his own version of Ezra Pound to convince him to edit this novel. I get the feeling that Delany was unwilling or unable to throw the least scrap of writing onto the cutting room floor! Sometime, plot elements seem to be invented ENTIRELY to glue together unrelated writing exercises! But, what am I saying! Delany is The Master!

It's hard to write a review for this book. The first time I read was like ten years ago. I was around 15 or 16. It looks intimidating. Thick, and as hard to get into as a bar on Sunset on Friday night.

I was an English major in college and I have never read anything like it. I've read it two or three times since then and I still don't get it all. Am I supposed to? I would love to meet Delany and ask him what it all means, but I'm sure he would say that would ruin the whole point.

One of the things that stands out most is the dialogue. It's amazingly written. Pick out any piece of dialogue (without the speaker's name) and anyone familiar with the text would know exactly who was speaking. That's very difficult to accomplish. His characters are so real, so convincing, it's seem like they are alive somethere, still living.

I think the loop of the beginning and end, "... to wound..." is one of the strengths of the novel. It's better to not know the answers. If everything was spelled out, what fun would that be? The ambiguity gives it depth and intrigue.

I think about aspects of this story with frightening regularity. Everytime I go under a street light, I think of Dhalgren. I swear one pulses and dies just because I am looking. Everytime I look at the moon, I think of George.

An interesting part sticks with me. I'll paraphrase: in a week, I can't remember five days. In a year, how many days will YOU never think of again. How true is that? Wow. What were you doing on Sep. 9th, 1994? If it's your B-day, anniversary, or whatever think of another date. How insignificant mundane, day-to-day things are in the grand sceme of time. Nothing matters, only hugely significant things are remembered or important. Delany goes into many other social, literary and cultural questions which would be too numberous to mention here. But they ALL matter to this book. Everything means something here and to cram in so many ideas and fit them together so well with such simple language is incredible.

What does it all mean? The red eye caps? The optic chains? The light projectors? The scratch on her leg? The notebook? Bill's name-is it William Dhalgren? I always thought that was Kid's name, because of the title. What year is it? What happened to the sun? Why can't he remember everything? Does Kid have multiple personalities? What's going on here?

I honestly don't know and really don't want to. It would spoil the wonder of it all. This novel is a remarkable peice of literature. It, along with The Lord of the Rings, has influenced me greatly. I know I might not have chosen to become a writer myself if it were not for this. To emulate and possibly achieve this level. If only I

I was given my copy of Dhalgren four years ago by a close friend who told me,"You have got to read this book!" I took the book and read it. I was stunned.

Delany's use of language and symbolism in Dhalgren conveys the feelings and actions of how a counter-culture society would exist in extreme situations. A deserted city; no day; no night; two moons and a bloated sun--are some of the bizarre happenings in the city of Bellona.

Delany also delves into the hearts and minds of his characters, allowing them to express with word and deed a mirror of today's world views with a subtlety that will stun anyone who apprieciates literature.

Not a book for the faint of heart, Dhalgren contains violence and very graphic sexual scenes.

If you love stories that explore human nature, Dhalgren may be a book for you. It's labeled Sci-Fi only because Delany had built a name for himself as a sci-fi writer before the publication of Dhalgren with his books "Nova" and "Trouble on Triton".

Dhalgren is a great read but take your time and absorb it. If you have trouble with it, put it down and come back to it later. Whatever you do, read the book cover to cover. You will not be disappointed.

Dhalgren is a book I have read and re-read and I still feel like I missed a lot of its subtle whisperings. The Kid himself is not an especially sympathetic character, the book muses on sex and race for longer than I can easily decipher, in liquid but complicated prose...it's not an easy book, and not a linear book, and there have been times I hated it. But I come back to it again and again, back to Bellona, back to shimmering disguises and strange passages. It's a book I feel compelled to grapple with.

I first read Dahlgren in high school in 1980 or so, at the age of 15 or 16, and some of my friends actually had Dahlgren parties, where they would dress the dress and (ugh!) eat the food. Fortunately, they did not have the sex. I didn't entirely get the book then; but I've read the book many times since then. It's one of those books that becomes different each time you read it, and at each phase of your life that you read it. For my part, for example, I did not at 15 understand why characters like Jack and Tarzan were so irritating, why Kid would find the commune so goofy, etc. In the meantime, I've read most of what Samuel R. Delany has written - including his autobiography - before 2000 or so.

Is Dahlgren a great book or a terrible book? Um, I'll go with "adequate," "interesting," "riveting," and "with very limited literary value, except as a curiosity." Ultimately I weigh in on recommending the book, with some caveats.

I won't summarize the plot, because previous reviewers have done that. I do have one observation about the title: Doesn't Dahlgren mean "green valley"? Isn't Bellona the opposite of a green valley? Which brings me to what's good and bad about this book. Delany's greatest strengths are his greatest weaknesses, too. Take his vivid and descriptive prose. You know what Bellona looks like. You can picture the Kid, Tak and Lanya - heck, you could pick them out of a photo line-up. But his vivid and descriptive prose can become windy and pedantic - we're talking pure style here. He tries too hard to convince the reader that he, Delany, is an intellectually gifted man. We know this. But dammit, I got a 720 on my SAT verbal back in the early `80's and I am here to tell you, if your most educated readers have to look up a word or three on every page in Oxford's Unabridged Dictionary, you're posing. I mean really, "phatic"? Must you?

Moving along to content - it is no secret that Delany is gay. It's obvious from the writing, but you can also read The Motion of Light in Water to get Delany's explicit thoughts on this. Delany is also an intellectual with some very strong beliefs about gender roles and propriety - such as that gender roles are solely a product of culture. He is a deconstructionist Marxist (from a literary viewpoint), and his insertion of these beliefs into his texts can get tiresome, especially if you're not one. Interestingly, there is one relatively normal suburban family in Dahlgren, and Delany savages this family - they are a bunch of perverted hypocrites, and living with them is a stifling, claustrophobic hell. Meanwhile, the bikers who gang-rape women, and medically neglect one girl whose sole function is to fester in a bed with an infection no one will treat, are sympathetic characters. This state of affairs is portrayed without any sense of irony.

Lanya says to Kidd, "Then be glad you're not a character sketched in the inside of someone else's notebook. Or you'd be deadly dull." I may have the quote wrong after so much time. It is the key to understanding the novel. Delany explores this theme in some of his other works -- including the Neveryon series. In fact, Lord Voldemar and the guy in Dahlgren who publish the newspaper are very similar characters.

I also have to say that some of Delany's writing is not memorable at all. Triton, The Fall of the Towers and the Einstein Intersection were books I could not put down, but I can't for the life of me remember what they're about. However, some of his short stories are brilliant and so are the Neveryon books. It is also helpful to note that Delany was for a time married to the poet Marilyn Hacker. It is interesting to find that some concepts that turn up in Dahlgren turn up in Hacker's poetry, too (What's in a park you warn girls out of? Queers. I'm pretty sure this is a dialogue in one of Hacker's poems and in Dahlgren). If you read Samuel Delany, read Marilyn Hacker.

If you want a semi-realistic portrait of what might happen in a city that lost its civilization due to some sort of disaster, read the book. But you have to read past some of Delany's windiness, and what's sad is you end up wishing the same book had been written by Stephen King. Oh, wait, it has. It's called The Stand and it's a masterpiece of modern urban folkloristics, although some of the characters are a little two-dimensional in spots. So to get the ideal book of this kind, Stephen King could handle the plot and the writing and Samuel Delany could handle the characterization.

In the opening pages, as the half-shod, half-barefoot drifter who comes to be known as Kid (he cannot remember his given name) approaches Bellona, he thinks, 'Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power there. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions.'

The nature of the disaster that has crippled communication and stripped the city's population down to about a thousand is never articulated although there are intimations aplenty. Once inside, Kid discovers the city ... or whatever has wreaked devastation upon it--is capricious: a building in pristine condition might stand next to one tilted on its foundation and gutted by fire. During what is supposed to be day, the light is gray, the sky and the tops of buildings are hidden by cloud and by smoke that drifts lethargically like fine mist. Ensconced in a perpetual twilight, Bellona is evasive, presenting not the straight edges and clean lines of Euclidean geometry, but the hazy flux at the heart of quantum mechanics.

In a notebook that he picks up on his first night in Bellona, Kid (presumably) writes: 'There is no articulate resonance ... That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source.'

Delany's mostly abandoned, half-wrecked city is meticulously laid out, detailed down to the rivets holding up street signs ... hard to pin down Bellona may be, but arbitrary it is not. As Delany once explained in a long letter, 'Our landscape, entirely true for any urban environment ... is made up totally of emblems of former human actions. From the sky (overcast because of the industrial effect or the greenhouse phenomenon), to each tree or glass blade in the city parks (the trees are there because someone put them there, or because someone left them there while clearing away others), the landscape is a dense interlocked web of the detritus of haphazard human action and/or intentional human undertaking.'

By the time you get used to living in Bellona, to the two moons that appear in its sky, you are no longer the same person. Reverend Amy, the only church leader left in the city, states in one of her typically concept-loaded sermons, 'Oh my poor, inaccurate hands and eyes! Don't you know that once you have transgressed that boundary, every atom, the interior of every point of reality, has shifted its relation to every other you've left behind, shaken and jangled within the field of time, so that if you cross back, you return to a very different space than the one you left? You have crossed the river to come to this city? Do you really think you can cross back to world where a blue sky goes violet in the evening, buttered over with the light of a single, silver moon?'

`Dhalgren' is, along with William Gaddis's `The Recognitions' and Julio Cortazar's `Hopscotch,' one of the few contemporary works of genuine genius. I've read it three times now and yes, it literally changed my life ... I have never crossed back over. Needless to say, I can't recommend it highly enough. However, readers ... `Dhalgren' fans especially---should also be aware of Delany's `1984', a collection of letters in which some fascinating details about the construction of `Dhalgren' come to light ... locations in San Francisco and New York on which Delany based descriptions as well as answers to some of the numerous enigmas enshrouded in the narrative. Your bookshelf shouldn't be without either one.

Capsulizing my reaction to this book is difficult, as I find compelling reasons both to love it and to hate it. Delany certainly has a better technique than any other author of science fiction. He can write with precision to evoke a mood or a sensory impression, and with imprecision to provoke thought. For example, the initial description of a character or place often omits a detail, allowing the reader to fill in the blank. Delany then clarifies the description later, forcing the reader to question why he or she chose to envision a particular race, gender, color, or other attribute for that character or place. There are many interesting scenes in the first 650 pages. I can also offer unreserved praise for the final chapter, which brilliantly mixes incomplete notebook pages with text and later commentary.

But, but, but -- much of the text is pointless. For example, a multi-page description of a recording session reads more like a creative writing class exercise than actual literature, and certainly proves Elvis Costello's observation that writing about music is like dancing about architecture -- uninformative and pretentious. Descriptions of the decaying city are initially interesting but they become dull with repetition. The characters' endless philosophizing is obscure, and often trite. This and other verbiage makes much of the book tough going, and buries key elements of the story line.

Finally, Dhalgren should not be seen as science fiction. The only new technologies are peripheral to the plot, and there are no societal developments to differentiate Dhalgren from the world of the late 1960s. Rather, the book is more a ham-handed magical realism, with the city of Bellona a bloated, pornographic Macondo.