Dhalgren

Rating:
Summary: even its flaws are part of its plan
Review: Dhalgren bears some superficial resemblance to science fiction, but it's after something much more ambitious than most SF. Delany constructs a bisexual protagonist, of mixed race, who suffers patches of amnesia (he cannot recall his own name) and who lives in an unstable, shifting city-- through this character Delany questions all the ways identity normally is built. Race, sexual identity, memories, place -- Delany seeks to call attention to these things as liquid, not fixed. In turn, this calls the stories we tell about ourselves into question, and the book frequently challenges the very premise of narrative structure as a way to represent the world accurately. (This has the potent effect of using what initially appear to be flaws in the novel as points in the book's overall argument.) Things start off slow, but by the book's final section the book's elegant construction becomes plain: everything begins to resonate with everything else, leaving you slack-jawed and wowed. A major work, erotic, nuanced, and brilliant: as thorough an exploration of the human condition as any I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: A densely written tour de force
Review: "You have confused the true and the real," reads the epigram at the beginning of this long, complex novel. The true and the real? Are they different? So what? What does that have to do with anything, anyway?

Welcome to Dhalgren, the masterwork of science fiction's most learned and intellectual practitioner. I have worked my way through this long book (879 pages in the Bantam paperback edition) once or twice a year since I discovered it in 1976. Each time, I spot more details, attain a deeper understanding of the story and the ideas that lie under it.

The book is the story of a young drifter who has somehow lost track of his name and many of the details of his life. He travels to Bellona, a made-up city that has, some months or years before, undergone some cataclysm, a breakdown of society. Television and radio don't work. There is no contact with the outside world. Almost everyone has departed, leaving gangs, back-to-the-earthers, do-gooders, and others. In the absence of laws and authorities, they find a way to live together. The main character--called variously "the kid," "the Kid," and "Kidd" (keep track, these variations are significant)--finds a place in this anarchic protosociety as a poet and a gang leader. Ultimately he creates an identity, a sense of who he is...and in the final pages, leaves the city.

The city is not a normal place. Buildings burn without being consumed. Some laws of physics seem suspended. One night a second moon rises over the city; the next day, everyone agrees not only that the second moon was there, but they also share an understanding of the second moon's name. None of these details are explained.

The textual complexity is immense. Early in the book, the Kid finds a discarded notebook with writing on only one side of the paper. He flips through it to a random page. The text on the page is almost precisely the same text that appears on page 1 of Dhalgren--that is, Kidd's own story! The kid keeps the notebook and begins using it as a journal. He writes poetry in it. One long section of Dhalgren is presented as a palimpsest--that is, a document in which layers of embellishments and commentaries are presented as an integral part of the text. In this section, it is impossible to tell which portions are written by Kidd and which already existed in the notebook when he found it.

Throughout, Delany uses kaleidoscopic, beautiful language. Pick a page at random and read it aloud; it will sound like poetry. One marvels at the sustained effort that allowed Delany to maintain the vision and tone of this book through 879 pages.

The book starts in mid-sentence, by the way. And it ends mid-sentence. The two ends fit; it's possible that the final words of the book are the beginning of the first sentence, and that the entire novel can be read in a circle.

Explicit sex scenes--heterosexual, homosexual, groups--and adult language mean this book is not for everyone. But if such things don't bother you, pick up a copy. Delany will take your imagination on a ride you will never forget.

Rating:
Summary: A Surreal Masterpiece
Review: SF in the 70's was characterized by Lifestyle SF (as termed by Brian Aldiss) as opposed to Hard scientific SF for example. Dhalgren was simply the best among the lifestyle genre. Samuel Delany's rendering of characters paints a large canvass full of subtle ambiguities and surreal landscapes of a ruined city, Bellona, that defies rationale but engages the reader's emotion, making him or her participate in its creation. It's a book about waking and dreaming, about counter culture society and about the possibilities of language and how you mold the world with it and vice versa. What strikes you most is the use of words and style to evoke nameless complex emotions. Let me give you an example, a passage in Dhalgren:

' How jealous I am of those I have known, afraid to sleep for dreaming. I fear those moments before sleep when words tear from the nervous matrix and like sparks, light what responses they may. That fragmented vision, seductive with joy and terror, robs rest of itself. Gratefully sunk in nightmare, where at least the anxious brain freed from knowing its own decay can flesh those skeletal epiphanies with visual or aural coherence, if not rationale: better those landscapes where terror is experienced as terror and rage as rage than this, where either is merely a pain in the gut or a throb above the eye, where a nerve spasm in the shin crumbles a city of bone, where a twitch in the eyelid detonates both the sun and the heart. ' (chapter 4, p. 342)

This passage typifies the book in general. A tour de force of visual and literary imagination that waxes poetic often in painfully unsettling and disturbing ways. Complex characterization, no plot apparently - but here lies it's strength for it is composed of layers upon layers of varied experiences, past and future mixing together, memory loss (the protagonist) and circularity, (the book's end is the beginning). Dhalgren belongs to the group of novels that typefies 20th century miasma like Joyce's Ulysses, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or Herbert's Dune. I've read the book 12 years ago and still Bellona's images visit my dreamscape from time to time. Dhalgren is a Masterpiece in any genre.

Rating:
Summary: The greatest book about cities ever written
Review: I am obsessed with Delany, and I probably always will be. I still bite my fingernails because of him. I first read Dhalgren at 19, while living in Philadelphia, living in a city for the first time, no plans, no goals, no ambitions. I was in my own Bellona, squatting with fellow scorpions, having the magical edges of my reality dictated to me by this incredible book. Dhalgren is real in a way that most of my life hasn't been, and when I feel nostalgia, what I miss is the psychotopographies of Bellona as laid out in Dhalgren. It is the greatest novel about a city ever written; any one of the Surrealists (Breton especially) would slit his throat to write a book half as good, but wouldn't have the balls to stomach the finished result. People who have not read Dhalgren are inferior to those of us who have, but there is a clear remedy for this. Read the book. And read Heavenly Breakfast too, so you can see where Delany first walked into Bellona.

Rating:
Summary: A dark study of Multiple Personality Disorder
Review: Dahlgren is one of those novels that simply begs to be read over and over in order to try and get a gasp on what is happening to the characters and surroundings in this psuedo sci-fi study. Being a multiple myself, I sometimes wonder why it took me four readings to realise that the main character does indeed exibit all the signs of being himself a Multiple. Through the first couple of reads the various plots seem to jump... quite at random... from one state to another; much as a late James Joyce novel such as "Finigans Wake" does... the novel does in fact seem to have no true beginning or end, it just loops continuously. This style, while quite interesting, still does not explain the various plots and their seemingly unconnected jumps and twists. If however, the reader begins the book carrying the thought that the main character is indeed a Multiple, then all those strange plot twists and seemingly unconnected characters begin to make perhaps a shred of sense. The main character is Multi, and switches between different alternate identities (alters) quite at random, and just like myself and my own system of alters, each percieves the world in a totally different light. Each sees things that the others cannot; thus, the reality of one alter bears very little resemblance to that of another. The constantly changing and intermixing plots in Dahlgren reflect this Multiplicity in it's base form, and when I read the novel as a "system"... a different alter dealing with each plot change... the novel takes on an entirely different look and feel. The seeming lack of continuity disappears totally, and the novel resolves itself into one single, well intertwined plot involving a city in the midst of slow destruction. There is still no real beginning or end to the story, but I believe that Delaney wrote this way on purpose as an examination of the slow decay of any large urban center in this age. I do realise that as an alter, my own perception of this novel is, by it's very nature, totally different from that of a Monomind and so it must be. Perhaps I am totally wrong here, and it is that very Multiplicity that makes me so, but that is the only way any of us can see the novel, now that this theory has pushed it's way into our system. I grant you this is a theory from way out in left field, but I also believe that it is one that should perhaps be explored the next time you pick up the novel to read it through yet again...

Rating:
Summary: Noelle's review
Review: This is a wonderful book by Samuel R. Delany. I have met him before with my parents and he seemed to be a nice guy. This is a very interesting book. My father liked it so much he wrote a rock opera on it. I like how the very end of the book is just the begining of it. I found the characters good(like the scorpians).

Rating:
Summary: The book that changed my life...
Review: I read Dahlgren in the late 70's when I was in my twenties. It remains one of my favorite books - in fact, I always think of it as "the book that changed my life." I am a playwright, and I was mesmorized by the visual images Delany was able to paint with his words. They remain with me today. The characters in the book are like old friends to me. And the ideas expressed helped me to see the world in a new and different light. I went on to read all of Delany I could get my hands on, but Dhalgren remains my favorite. Who can argue with a moon named George Harrison?

Rating:
Summary: The only book that rivals DUNE in vision
Review: Dhalgren and Dune, if you only read two books in your life these should be them.

Rating:
Summary: It ruined me on Delany for life
Review: I read Dhalgren some 22 years ago, at the age of 16. I have been bitter towards Delany and all his works ever since. A book such as Dhalgren, with its fantastic imagery and inexplicable happenings is nothing but a cheat if there is no enlightment forthcoming somewhere in the story. To DRAG IT ON for 100's and 100's of pages is more than an author's whim; it's a deliberate thumbing of his nose at the reader.

I don't know what type of "life changing event" the author had made his own. I only know that since spending a month of my 16 year old life devouring this book whenever I had a chance, and feeling so cheated (and laughed at by the Author) at the unsatisfying end, I will never read, purchase or even line a bird cage with another Delany book.

Leave this one on the shelf. At least there it balances the weight of the worthy books on either side.

Rating:
Summary: A combination of great and pointless
Review: 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.