William Gibson. The Gernsback Continuum
Rated • 3 reviews • science fiction, ebooks • lib.ru
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Klassy/ebooks
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Klassy is a 26 year old woman from San Francisco, California, USA
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Hunger, by Knut Hamsun
Rated • 5 reviews • books, ebooks • adelaide.edu.au
So how did the Scandinavians all get so grim, anyway? Ibsen, Munch, Strindberg, Kierkegaard, Ingmar Bergman -- it's a pretty grim list. Though Grieg is cheerful enough, I suppose.
In any case, I spent the unholy hours of the early morning reading this one: Hunger by Knut Hamsun, who might well be the grimmest of the lot. And now I want to wax lyrical about it, about how I don't quite like it but can't seem to forget about it at all. I don't know. Give it a read. I have mixed feelings.
The novel is almost completely characterless and plotless. It is nothing but a minutely detailed catalogue or map of the experiences of a certain kind of personality undergoing extreme psychological distress.
The hero (more like an anti-hero, actually, along the lines of Dostoyevsky's underground man, only considerably a little more self-satisfied) -- the granddaddy of all starving artists -- might be the most utterly introverted literary character I've ever encountered in literature. (At least only among the ones I've read.)
He is desperately trapped inside of his own head, and seemingly not all that displeased with this fact. The narrator's voice is consistently detached, skeptical, and even amused in describing the most harrowing of circumstances, frequently charming and often quite hilarious. Ordinarily, this would be the sort of thing I'd be a sucker for, but I had a hard time getting over just how repellent I found his lack of interest in anything beyond his direct experience to be. It's not just the novel's lack of any sort of human relationship -- I can be perfectly satisfied reading books without those, or I wouldn't love A Rebours at all, for instance. But even there in A Rebours, the whole book is an obsessive list of things that Des Esseintes genuinely loves, even if they are only things.
Whereas here in Hunger, the main emotions expressed are merely just spleen and irritation, dread, and an overwhelming pride.
Of course, in cases like this, at least with me there's always the danger of over-identification. And I found a number of the narrator's mental states familiar enough for the book to be genuinely quite alarming. I've never experienced such genuine hunger like this, but I've got a glimpse: the things he describes aren't so terribly different from what I've felt with high fevers, or going several days without sleep, watching other people trip on drugs horribly, and even a few frightening experiences of that sort of my own. Also, panic attacks, or those times when you wake up from a nightmare during a nap to find that the world has become some sort of strange hell, all magnified to massive, terrifying proportions.
I've only just seen the borders of that country of desperation, but I've seen enough that a detailed description of the interior that this book has delved into. It was all so unsettlingly familiar.
In spite of how off-putting I found it, there is no denying that this book was exquisitely written. And, stranger yet for a book so psychologically-oriented, it gives off a remarkably vivid sense of place, enough so that it's disorienting to look up and find yourself in 21st-Century America -- and not 19th century Oslo.
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Against the Grain - Wikisource
Rated • 1 review • books, ebooks, des esseintes • wikisource.org
[1]
"There's more to life than books, you know. But not much more."
"Nothing however had been of such aid to her as the silence, unless it were the chains. The chains and the silence which ought to have sealed her isolated self within twenty impenetrable walls, to have asphyxiated her, strangled her, hadn't; to the contrary, they'd been her deliverance, liberating her from herself. What might have become of her had speech been accorded her and freedom granted her hands, had the faculty of free will been hers when her lover prostituted her while he looked on? She had spoken, it is true, under torture; but may one designate as words these which are only plaints and screams? Again, they often stilled her with gags.
Beneath those stares, beneath those hands, beneath those sexes which raped her, beneath those lashes which tore her, she sank, lost in a delirious absence from herself which gave her unto love and loving, and may perhaps have brought her close to death and dying. She was - who? anyone at all, no-one, someone else...."
[2]
"Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties."
"Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris - all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...those vile bodies..."
[ 3 ]
"Like an eremite, he was ripe for solitude, harassed by life's stress, expecting nothing more of existence; like a monk again, he was overwhelmed with an immense fatigue, a craving for peace and quiet, a longing to have nothing more to do henceforth with the vulgar, who were in his eyes all utilitarians and fools."
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Pipistrello: and other stories - Google Books
Rated • 1 review • books, ouida, ebooks • google.com
"I am only Pipistrello.
Nothing but that; nothing more than any one of the round brown pebbles that the wind sets rolling down the dry bed of the Tiber in summer.
I am Pipistrello; the mime, the fool, the posturer, the juggler, the spangled saltimbank, the people's plaything, that runs and leaps and turns and twists, and laughs at himself, and is laughed at by all, and lives by his limbs like his brother the dancing bear, and his cousin the monkey in a red coat and a feathered cap."
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Poetica Erotica: A Collection of ... - Google Books
Rated • 1 review • poetry, ebooks • google.com
A Courtesan's Whim
To calm desires that in my soul increase,
Delicious boys with poems of blond hair,
Supple, dusk-eyed, whose eager kisses rare
Are sweet as dew, no longer bring me peace.
I tire of the effeminate charm of Greece,
These Apollonian men with broad breasts bare,
Superbly statuesque, supremely fair;--
A God himself would tempt not my desire.
But in vague ways I most insanely yearn
To meet some lean, dwarfed, fetid, hairy thing
With loathsome skin and bulging eyes of rheum,
Then with wild sighs to make the monster burn
With Love's delight and bid his hot arms cling
Around my beauty in the perfumed gloom.
{ Francis Saltus Saltus }
1849-1889
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Book
Rated • 1 review • books, ebooks • taletwist.com
17 chapters transform you into a wanderer between the worlds.
It is free to traverse and lurk here. All you have to do is read on.
1. Approach
2. Shelter
3. Traveler
4. Abroad
5. Transit
6. Bridge
7. Hills
8. Scoring
9. Loose
10. Walking
11. Edge
12. Heights
13. Depths
14. Unloading
15. Shattered
16. Caught
17. Passage
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http://www.gite-lauvitel.com/beyond-the-8-05.html
Rated • 1 review • books, ebooks • gite-lauvitel.com
Where Man and Mountain meet.
A tale of four Himalayan adventures.
20 chapters. Read the entire book for free.
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Scribd
Rated • 5 reviews • books, ebooks, borges, pass it on • scribd.com
this is free, take it, and
feel better
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Stranded in the Jungle--Table of Contents
Rated • 1 review • books, ebooks • dhalgren.com
Critical theory meets hash. Or something like that.
Read through this mad romp.
