Dhalgren

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Summary: Dhalgren: a multi-layered literary achievement.
Review: Dhalgren is a novel that, while it first appears to be linear (if you try to piece together the notebook parts of the final chapter), later seems to be circular (the end can loop to the beginning) and, finally, turns out to be a multi-layered construct. Something close to an optical illusion in literary form. This book is not truly science fiction in the classic sense, but it doesn't fit any other category. Perhaps you'd come closer to the mark if you take the initials SF and call it "speculative fiction." Regardless of category, this book is an amazing literary achievement. I am currently re-reading Dhalgren for (I believe) the 7th time, and I'm still as astounded and absorbed by the book as I was the first time through. Delany's characters and characterizations are so real, it's sometimes as though he's writing about someone you know. Add to that the masterful way Delany uses the English language and you have a very enjoyable, if challenging, read. A small postscript: while this new Wesleyan Press edition includes further corrections to the preferred 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Bantam editions, it unfortunately introduces new errors of it's own. I've counted over 20 so far (comparing them against the Bantam editions), and I'm sure I've missed at least a few. Still, most are simple things like missing quotation marks or an un-capitalized name, and they don't significantly detract from the book as a whole.

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Summary: A waste of good pulp
Review: I found this book so boring and un-realistic that I could notfinish it. SF is supposed to have some foothold in reality, and thenextrapolate on the possibilities -- ideally not breaking the laws of physics in the process. This book just rambles on for hundreds of pages about nothing. Maybe I am just to un-enlightened to "get it", afterall, I do not like Piscaso either.

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Summary: a critical read
Review: "Dhalgren" isn't science fiction in any conventional sense, but it is filled with an incredible strangeness and wonder that will appeal to fans of the genre. By far Delany's most complex and ambitious novel, it is one of the 4 or 5 best I've ever read. Delany's interests in communal living (see "Heavenly Breakfast"), "perverse" sex ("Hogg", "Equinox"), memory ("The Motion of Light in Water"), and literary form (the "Neveryona" series) are all brought together in a layered narrative that overlaps and comments on itself while still managing to present a compelling story. Although shunned by narrowminded purists, "Dhalgren" is Delany's most widely read book, and a hugely influence on the science fiction of the 80's and 90's

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Summary: The most fascinating Science Fiction Book Ever?
Review: One of the most controversial Science Fiction books ever published, "Dhalgren" remains to this day my favorite piece of fiction in any category. As its critics say, it IS long, confusing, and full of 'perverse' sex.....but it is also filled with beautiful prose, interesting characters, and a stunning moebius loop of a storyline.Anyone looking for rocketships, aliens or space battles will be sadly disappointed, but for anyone who wants to read a complex, difficult and emotionally charged novel, this is the book for you

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Summary: Take a mythical journey to the lost city of Bellona.
Review: Few books are able to capture the essence of a time, a place, a way of life, the way this book captures the wild turbulence of the 60's. Delany has created not so much a story as a living microcosm that changes and develops as it unfolds. The mythical city of Bellona is a metaphor for the revolutions going on all around the world. After reading, one feels as if he/she has experienced the golden era, without any of the opinionated editorialism and sensationalsim that comes with the media. This science fiction classic is as pertinent today as it was when it was written. I find myself going back and reading bits of past dialogue and always finding a new insight. After you read it once you'll find yourself drawn back into that mysterious world; and, like the tragic hero of the story, if you're careful, you'll return with something more valuable than what you took with you.

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Summary: An Epic Enigma, A Surreal Poem Not Bound By Time
Review: In my humble opinion "Dhalgren" is one of the finest pieces of modern epic fiction ever written. I first read this work some 19 years ago, on a friend's referral (Hi "Punk", wherever you are, thanks again - God bless you), when I was an English major in college, and frankly it changed my life - it just shattered any previous concepts I had about the creative process of writing (& reading, for that matter). I have never read anything like it before or since - I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the prose - almost as though every page was a piece of stream-of-consciousness blank verse - soaked in super-real imagery the likes of which are simply mind-boggling. "Dhalgren" is a work that is steeped in questions - most of them left up to the reader's imagination - so if you're the type of reader who must leave "no stone unturned" in terms of resolving such enigmas, you'd probably be disappointed in this work. On the other hand, if you want to take your mind on a trip and simply wallow in some of the finest, most surrealistic imagery ever composed in the English language (not to mention some of the most iconoclastic writing techniques), then you would dig this book (if you're like me and are fascinated with words and their often beautiful, ominous and breath-taking capabilities, you will find this a great read). There are so many layers to this story, so many ways to appreciate this work, it is hard to encapsulate them all here. If I can formulate a fragment of an idea based on the title of the first chapter ("Prism, Mirror, Lens"), it is as though you are viewing this landscape - this forgotten city, wounded by some inexplicable catastrophy - through a prism, your vision being splintered into a dozen distorted views of the same thing -the fabric of time is in a constant state of flux, and, as in a dreamstate, you can not quite put your finger on the pulse of what is reality. It is almost as though, upon completion of the first reading, you can go back to this novel and re-read it (or portions thereof) completly out of sequence and gain further insight into its characters and events - the text itself seems to "work" completly out of sync with itself, if you will. All in all, a fantastic & thought-provoking journey, an enigma rooted in a not-too-far-out reality, a mind-game, a beautifully disturbing dream for the adventurous reader who might prefer something other than the standard "sci-fi" fare. I have often thought that David Lynch might be capable of making this into a film, and perhaps Brian Eno could score it, but this work is ultimately best left to blossom in the mind of the reader, for the rest of their lives (and it will, believe me).

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Summary: A masterpiece by the master of the English language!
Review: 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.

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Summary: Life Altering Experience
Review: Dhalgren is the Moby Dick of SciFi/Fantasy. It is not an easy, casual read. I first read this book almost thirty years ago, and couldn't stop thinking about it for the next decade. Many of my present attitudes about life can be traced back to scenes from Dhalgren.

The story is rife with symbolism, probably not all intentional, definitely ambiguous, and with different interpretations for different readers (or even for the same reader at different times). You've heard people say about a book, "I just couldn't put it down!" Well, I HAD to put Dhalgren down many times to think about what I had just read. Then, when I picked it up again I might read the same passages differently (there's more than one way to read Dhalgren, as you'll see if you make it to the middle of the book). This is a rich and poetic piece of American Literature, and definitely not for someone looking for some quick and easy escapism, though its readers will escape much farther than do the readers of Clancy or Brown.

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Summary: Rumors of Dhalgren's impenetrability are greatly exaggerated
Review: 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.

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Summary: Waste of time and money
Review: I have to agree with one of the other reviewers on this page. The book is PATHETIC. It is a pity that the lowest rating on this site is one star, because I don't think the book deserves a rating that high.

I could not finish the book, and I don't think I will ever try to read it again.

Don't waste time or money on this one.