Dhalgren

Rating:
Summary: Thought I had written a review for this one before...
Review: This book is not for the sqeamish. Stay away if you are (insert here) - phobic. Homo-phobic, eroto-phobic, claustra-phobic, agora-phobic, reviewa-phobic, editoria-phobic....

This book has a lot to say, if you've got the stomach for it, read this book. Just don't expect to understand it while you read it. Understanding only comes after finishing the book, reflecting on it, tripping on it, sleeping on it, then re-reading it only to discover you got it all wrong.

Don't expect to know what is going on all the time (or even most of the time). As in Catch-22, the scenes aren't always chronological, they are not organized by theme, nor will one necessarily explain the next. Consider: imagine yourself with several college buddies with one or two you knew from high school, and another you meet at work last month. Will the telling of tales be ordered - chronologically or thematically? Or will one tale remind one person of something which he blurts out and starts to tell, leaving someone else with a tale she was reminded of but will wait until she gets a chance to tell? Will the tale of the high school prom necessarily be told before the tale of the panty raid, or the party during finals week? Yet, once all the stories are told, the new guy still comes away with some understanding of who these people were, what they were like, and the kind of world they came from. Analogy over.

I would give this book 6 out of 5 stars if (I could). It is the experience of a lifetime. A completely self-contained universe that parallels ours closely enough to frighten. Other reviewers have compared it (both favorably and unfavorably) to Herbert's Dune. Themes of coping in hostile environments is the only similarity. Delany's world actively seeks to screw with the heads of the readers and the inhabitants alike.

Rating:
Summary: This book wrecked my life
Review: I read this book about 25 years ago. I read and read and read. I couldn't think about anything else. I couldn't stop reading. It took me a long time and when it was over I was so screwed up I wandered away from home into years of madness. I tried to live out the inner meaning of Dhalgren. I did not succeed. I lost my career my sanity and my health. I will never recover completely. I'm not even sure if it was worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Petered out (me)
Review: Well, this is probably a five star book and I'm just not up to the challenge--I'm willing to admit to that. I started reading this over the past summer. I had plenty of time and not much on my mind--I find that for books that are more for thought and not so much for entertainment that I need to have an uncluttered time period. So I made it through the first 400 pages or so of the book and really did enjoy the general idea of the whole thing. I enjoyed reading about Kid's meanderings and even learned a little bit about how to read poetry (from the town's guest poet). In fact, there are lots of things about the book that are still running around in my head, which is to me a sign of a good book, and I'm genuinely curious about where the next turn is. Unfortunately, I gave up reading the book because of the extended sexual encounters I ran into in the middle of the whole thing. It really added nothing to the story. Delany totally lost my interest at that point, and as I flipped ahead things didn't seem to really look like they were going to improve. So I put it down and I probably won't pick it up again unless my curiousity truly gets the better of me. There's just so much out there to read, I couldn't see wasting any more time.
Lots of good segments here and there though--worth a look.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Profound(ly Boring) Novel of all time?
Review: This certainly must rank with one of the worst books I've had the displeasure of reading, but judging from the reviews given, I thought I'd be reading a modern-day Kafka. Instead what 'Dhalgren' is a misshapen pile of self-righteous, horribly dated 70's-style smug social commentary, dabbled generously with cheesy porno passages, and leavened throughout with an unbearable atmosphere of pretentious phrasing.
We all know that writers as 'enlightened' as Delany don't have to engage in all the dusty old anachronisms such as plot, interesting dialogue or setting, so what we get instead are insufferable faux-poetic descriptions (page after blustery page of it), and unintentionally ridiculous dialogue from the 'Kid' who fancies himself a poet, and the equally dull characters who he meets and usually copulates with. Ugh. I cannot believe a talented writer like Johnathan Lethem lent his praise to this overwrought work. As for the supposed 'surreal' quality of the work, there are infinitely more ideas and interest in a 200 page work by Philip K. Dick (not to mention interesting characters) than in the 800-odd pages Delany wastes getting absolutely nowhere. Spare yourself the time-read Borges, read Kafka, read Dick-indeed, even read the local newspaper before this. Avoid unless you are an avid fan of pretension over content.

Rating:
Summary: pointless waste of paper
Review: This is not a "challenging" book - this is a *dull* book.

This has to be one of the dullest, most aimless books I've ready in a very long time. Having read the "rave" reviews here and elsewhere, I entered Dhalgren excited about the possibilities. I left Dhalren wondering what was the point. Not that the book started out very interesting; in face, I kept reading thinking "*something* interesting will happen in the next 20 pages". Nothing ever happened. Nothing.

Dhalgren is about a drifter who finds himself in the city Dhalgren. We never really discover much about the city, which to me was a real disappointment. We never really learn much about the main character, other than a few terse bits of information here and there. Page after page of monotonous dialog followed by even more pages of the protaganist's rambling thoughts. Other characters are introduce but never really given life. Worse yet, we are given information about characters and events which are never explored. It was VERY frustrating to be given a piece of information which leads nowhere.

I never really cared about Kidd, nor anyone else in the city. Thoughts, ideas, and events that might have proven interesting were ingored and left to die; while sex, three-ways, pack behavior where constantly flaunted. That wouldn't even be bad if the plot was interesting. After the third scene of Kidd and two of his friends having sex, I lost all interest in what any of them were thinking or doing.

This book is the city of lost opportunities. There are ideas in this book that could have lead to something extraordinary. Instead, Dhalgren is just plain dull. If you like rambling, "intellectual", pointless prose, by all means pick it up. Otherwise, I'd avoid this at all costs.

Rating:
Summary: Hype
Review: I don't mind a challenging book, but I need to get something, anything from the excertion and after 450 pages, "Dhalgren" didn't budge. More than anything at that point, it is only science fiction because of the 70's porno amount of sex Kidd engages in. I didn't feel any closer to understanding him, (its annoying to have a "nameless" character for too long, even if great writer's like Kafka did it) or much of the novel. Its a subtle science fiction, no spaces ships or laser guns. Even as frustrating as the first half was for me, I do hope to go back and try to finish it, because so many other reviewers got something out of it but I had to pull myself to a less tedious book for now. I liked Delany's juxtaposition of third person with first person stream of consciousness, it worked well even if it is underused.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time and Money
Review: Yes, reading the first chapters of this book was definitely for me a lost day... This book does nothing right. The language is pretentious, the plot is extremely boring, and the whole thing is simply feeling wrong. I cannot understand why W.Gibson is praising this book in the foreword as a forerunner of his novels. He is simply another class of writer.

Rating:
Summary: Impenetrable Fortress
Review: I first tried to read this book when it was first published, thrilled to have a new Delany in my hands, as he is one of my favorite authors. But I couldn't finish it then, it just became too obscure and without point. Recently reminded of this book , I realized I was still irritated by this failure (surely it had to be a fault with me, not such a great writer), so I sat down over the last several days and read it, cover to cover. Net result:

a. The book is not SF. It may not even be fantasy (although there are certain happenings within it that would certainly place in the fantasy realm, such as two moons showing up for just one night -- this is Earth). Perhaps it belongs with certain works by Kafka.

b. There are important themes that Delany addresses in this book, such as the mutability and slipperiness of time, how each individual experiences time differently; some long polemics on the art and purpose of writing; some decent commentary on 'proper' social mores and how they come into being; how gods are made.

c. Unfortunately, items in (b) are buried inside an almost impenetrable fortress of non-plot, asides, deliberately mixed up time order of events, a confusing cast of characters (some of whom you don't learn who they are till after they have already performed important actions), double side by side stories (on the same page), and a whole raft of symbols and metaphors that he deliberately leaves few clues about what they are supposed to represent, non-closure of what is the apparent main story, occasional use of stream-of-consciousness (with no warning about transition from normal prose), etc, etc, etc.

d. This book is dense. It took me almost twice as long as normal to read than the equivalent number of pages in a normal novel. Also, come armed with a good dictionary -- while most of the prose is simple, occasionally, especially when he seems to be speaking ex cathedra , his use of very uncommon words becomes spectacular.

e. The language, as usual for Delany, is compelling, beautiful, near-poetry at times. His characters (those that he actually develops) are very different (and intriguing) from the norm (also normal for him). The failure here is the construction of this work. Too much of it is non-linear, snapshots unconnected to each other, logic totally discarded. While this may have been exactly what he intended, it leaves the reader with no focal point from which to appreciate this work.

Conclusion: read at your own risk. But at least I no longer have that nagging irritation about the book.

Rating:
Summary: Science Fiction Idiom Bent And Warped
Review: I first read Samuel R Delany's "Dhalgren" out of highschool, 1974, and have read it many times since. It is one of the finest novels I have read in the wake of James Joyce (Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" is another).

Is our conception of reality in fact based on solid rock? Or is this basis subject to shifts in time, warpage of space, illusionary, wrapping back on itself? Do we enter Bellona in curiosity, finding afterwards that we can never leave?

I'm not sure it's Delany's best novel, but it is one of masterworks of science fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Is Dhalgren the most boring book of all time?
Review: Yikes. Someone has actually re-released this book?

Once upon a time Samuel R Delaney wrote a couple of things, one called Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones and the other called The Einstein Intersection, and was universally hailed as a great literary genius of science fiction. Then he wrote something called Dhalgren just to prove that everyone was wrong. I vividly remember reading it at the time. Okay, not so vividly. Actually, I slept through most of the reading. I mentioned it to a couple of friends. Boring, they said. I read a long review of it. Boring, the review said.

What's it about? Well, there's this future inner city that's falling apart at the seams, inhabited by the kind of people you'd expect to find in a place like that. They have day-to-day existences, of a sort. And, thanks to Dhalgren, you get to read all about their day-to-day existences. And read. And read. This is not a brief novel.

For those who like symbols, there's symbolism. For example, a pink moon (not our present moon, but a different moon) suddenly appears in the sky for no particular reason. And the hero likes to wear a shoe on his right foot and leave his left foot bare. You know, kind of like some of the heroes of Greek mythology --Jason and Theseus as I recall, or was it Jason and Oedipus? Well, Jason and somebody. Of course, they didn't wear only one sandal habitually. They just each happened to have lost one while crossing a river, and doubtless bought a new pair as soon as they could. But this guy, well he just likes to wear his shoes that way because of the symbolism of it all. Hey, it's that kind of a book.