Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Bantam (1975), Paperback, 896 pages
Description
In Bellona, reality has come unglued, and a mad civilization takes root A young half-Native American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellona-only something is wrong there . . . In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound. So begins Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany's masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction could mean. A labyrinth of a novel, it raises questions about race, sexuality, identity, and art, but gives no easy answers, in a city that reshapes itself with each step you take . . . This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member RandyStafford
What to make of a novel once called "a vast monument to unreadability"?
First, I confess to not being a Delany fan. I think some of his popular science fiction criticism is worthwhile. He has a great talent for titles, and some of his descriptions have real poetic power. One need to look no farther
It's not accurate to say _Dhalgren_ is unreadable. Large chunks of it make sense and seem to be following a narrative pattern -- at least until the final "plague journal" segment. Our amnesiac hero, the Kid, wonders into Bellona, a city suffering from a recent and never specified disaster, meets some strange people, has lots of sex, takes up poetry and leading the Scorpions, a quasi-criminal gang. (Someone recently remarked on Bellona's resemblance to post-Katrina New Orleans. It's probably not entirely coincidental given that Delany wrote part of the novel in that city.)
Nor is it precise to say _Dhalgren_ is incoherent.
The ruling metaphor seems to be the peculiar chains of prisms, mirrors, and lens several characters, including the Kid, carry. Just as those optical devices spread light out, reflect it, and focus it, Delany's narrative does that with notions of truth, authority, or consistency. Besides the above mentioned narrative uncertainties, there are elliptic conversations; Kid's possible madness; the oddities of the setting with two moons, irregularly lengthened days, an anomalous sun peering very occasionally through the overcast; the ignoring of Bellona by the outside world. The Kid's journal, basis for our story, is fragmented, out of chronological order, and not even entirely by the Kid. All this serves to scatter any thematic statement other than reality not being knowable, the narrative a metafictional game. Yet, at other times, Delany has brief asides about the nature of our reality: the place of the engineer in society; the idea of a megalithic republic so big its inhabitants seldom leave it as opposed to smaller countries outside of China, the USSR, and America; or the oh-so-seventies notion of essential male-female identicalness. None of these sections has the tone, confidence, or entertainment of a Heinlein lecture at his most hectoring. The question of race is mentioned since most of the remaining inhabitants of Bellona are black. Yet here, and in the section pointing to the threesome of the Kid and his lovers Denny and Lanya as a new type of sexual relationshp, Delany seems to want to bring issues into focus. The same holds true for the relationship of the artist to society since Kid is a celebrity poet. But Delany's vagueness says nothing remarkable about race. Many people admire Kidd's poetry without reading it, and Delany deliberately gives us mixed messages about it. We see none of it, and it may be as bad as one character says. Delany's ambiguities undercut his frequent and annoying equation of artist as outlaw. Scorpion leader Kid may not be all that bad of a criminal, but he also may not be that great of a poet.
So, judged as conventional fiction, this novel is incoherent. But, if Delany's intent is metafictional puzzles, the constuction of a confusing story whose conclusion is a sentence fragment that melds with the novel's opening fragment, than his structure and technique do cohere.
Delany is guilty of one of three things here: incompetently attempting to convey a message beyond tedious metafiction, pulling the literary con of passing off obscurity and bad writing as a puzzle too difficult for the reader to solve but for which a solution exists, or not fitting the pieces of a real puzzle together well enough.
And Delany certainly seems aware of how most will react. A sentence toward the end: "... as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will have so changed by the book's end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial".
Read this novel only if you're working your way through one of those lists of recommended science fiction classics. And I suspect this novel will show up on fewer and fewer such lists as time goes on.
First, I confess to not being a Delany fan. I think some of his popular science fiction criticism is worthwhile. He has a great talent for titles, and some of his descriptions have real poetic power. One need to look no farther
Show More
than the opening page of his Babel-17 which heavily inspired the more famous opening to William Gibson's Neuromancer. But his fiction leaves me cold, and I find it unmemorable for the most part though this one, the worst I've read, will stick in my brain. It's not accurate to say _Dhalgren_ is unreadable. Large chunks of it make sense and seem to be following a narrative pattern -- at least until the final "plague journal" segment. Our amnesiac hero, the Kid, wonders into Bellona, a city suffering from a recent and never specified disaster, meets some strange people, has lots of sex, takes up poetry and leading the Scorpions, a quasi-criminal gang. (Someone recently remarked on Bellona's resemblance to post-Katrina New Orleans. It's probably not entirely coincidental given that Delany wrote part of the novel in that city.)
Nor is it precise to say _Dhalgren_ is incoherent.
The ruling metaphor seems to be the peculiar chains of prisms, mirrors, and lens several characters, including the Kid, carry. Just as those optical devices spread light out, reflect it, and focus it, Delany's narrative does that with notions of truth, authority, or consistency. Besides the above mentioned narrative uncertainties, there are elliptic conversations; Kid's possible madness; the oddities of the setting with two moons, irregularly lengthened days, an anomalous sun peering very occasionally through the overcast; the ignoring of Bellona by the outside world. The Kid's journal, basis for our story, is fragmented, out of chronological order, and not even entirely by the Kid. All this serves to scatter any thematic statement other than reality not being knowable, the narrative a metafictional game. Yet, at other times, Delany has brief asides about the nature of our reality: the place of the engineer in society; the idea of a megalithic republic so big its inhabitants seldom leave it as opposed to smaller countries outside of China, the USSR, and America; or the oh-so-seventies notion of essential male-female identicalness. None of these sections has the tone, confidence, or entertainment of a Heinlein lecture at his most hectoring. The question of race is mentioned since most of the remaining inhabitants of Bellona are black. Yet here, and in the section pointing to the threesome of the Kid and his lovers Denny and Lanya as a new type of sexual relationshp, Delany seems to want to bring issues into focus. The same holds true for the relationship of the artist to society since Kid is a celebrity poet. But Delany's vagueness says nothing remarkable about race. Many people admire Kidd's poetry without reading it, and Delany deliberately gives us mixed messages about it. We see none of it, and it may be as bad as one character says. Delany's ambiguities undercut his frequent and annoying equation of artist as outlaw. Scorpion leader Kid may not be all that bad of a criminal, but he also may not be that great of a poet.
So, judged as conventional fiction, this novel is incoherent. But, if Delany's intent is metafictional puzzles, the constuction of a confusing story whose conclusion is a sentence fragment that melds with the novel's opening fragment, than his structure and technique do cohere.
Delany is guilty of one of three things here: incompetently attempting to convey a message beyond tedious metafiction, pulling the literary con of passing off obscurity and bad writing as a puzzle too difficult for the reader to solve but for which a solution exists, or not fitting the pieces of a real puzzle together well enough.
And Delany certainly seems aware of how most will react. A sentence toward the end: "... as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will have so changed by the book's end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial".
Read this novel only if you're working your way through one of those lists of recommended science fiction classics. And I suspect this novel will show up on fewer and fewer such lists as time goes on.
Show Less
LibraryThing member CBJames
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, like the city where the novel is set, is a great, shambling mess of a novel, a true baggy-pants monster of a book. As the novel opens, the unnamed hero finds himself on the road to the deserted city of Bellona. He has lost most of his memory; he does not know where he
Bellona has suffered a singularity. It's not clear why the city has become cut off from the rest of America; no television, no radio, no telephones. Strange things happen. A building catches fire and burns for days without being consumed. Two full moons appear on the rare day when the constant smoke clears. Landmarks appear to shift. A single bus route is still running, its driver going where and when he will.
The unnamed hero, who becomes known as Kidd, never helps the reader solve the riddle of Bellona. He knows little of his past but it seems he was once in a psychiatric hospital. He suffers blackouts that jar the novel's narration several times leaving more holes in the story rather than filling any. The third person narration is so closely tied to Kidd, that it becomes as unreliable as he is.
Though the bulk of Dhalgren takes place in a single location, it's essentially a road novel. Kidd moves from one set of characters to another as he moves through the city. He begins at the commune in the park where he meets Lanya, a girl he will form a close bond with as the novel progresses. He spends the night with Tak Lafour, an engineer who moved into the city after its fall and became a sort of wise old man, the guy others go to for advice. Tak knows the fallen city inside out. Kidd gets a job moving furniture for the Richards family who insist on maintaining appearances, pretending that everything is normal as everything around them slowly falls apart. Mr. Richard's leaves for work each morning, though no one knows where he spends his day. Mrs. Richard's runs the family's luxury apartment as she always did, serving empty soup bowls at dinner time in a strange charade of the family dinner.
Kidd has found a notebook, filled with someone's diary about the city. He uses the blank pages and margins to write poetry of his own which is published in a small edition halfway through the novel by the city's main celebrity Roger Calkins who keeps a large, walled mansion filled with celebrity guests from the outside world. One of them, a poet, takes an interest in Kidd and encourages his writing. By the end of the novel, Kidd has fallen in with a street gang, the Scorpions, who wear mirrored disks that create holographic disguises. Kidd forms a family, reuniting with Lanya after the commune in the park breaks up, who becomes his girlfriend. The two are joined by Denny, a teenager who shares their bed.
What to make of all this? Should on even try to make anything?
Science fiction author and fan of the novel, William Gibson, has said that Dhalgren is "a riddle never meant to be solved." But it's human nature to solve riddles, even when there is no solution.
Some possibilities:
In the midst of this massive, post apocalyptic science fiction novel, Kidd is writing poems. Here Dhalgren becomes an extended meditation on the creation of art, how art works, where it comes from, how it suffers when it becomes a commodity, how the artists must finally face the reaction of the public. Not something I expected to find in a science fiction novel.
Though published in 1975, Dhalgren is a product of the 1960's; the influence of the hippie movement on it is clear. It can be read as a critique of the changes American society during that decade. The commune in the park Kidd finds when he first arrives in Bellona is a hippie paradise. Golden Gate Park 1968. The Summer of Love. The commune runs as a collective, everyone helps with the food, the maintainence of their camp and the construction of new shelters. The members move from partnership to partnership, without moral constraints. They are as free as anyone could be. The Richards, whom Kidd works for, don't know what to make of the commune nor of the changes their city has gone through. They insist on going on exactly like they always have. When their eldest son begins to question their way of life, they force him out and pretend he has died. Their daughter sneaks off to join the commune and to sleep with a radical black leader whenever she can. The commune falls apart, just as the hippie movement did. It ends in crime and exploitation without leaving any mark on the landscape, having failed to build any of the permanent structures they had planned.
There is much more in Dhalgren--as many solutions to its riddle as their are readers. I will be keeping my copy. I'm not sure if I'll ever re-read it--at 800 pages I make no promises--but if I do, I'm sure I find a new set of answers to its riddles. Dhalgren is that kind of book.
Show More
comes from nor why he is going to Bellona. Bellona itself is equally mysterious. The city has been deserted by almost all of its inhabitants. The few people who remain roam the empty streets living like parasites on what remains. Some have banded together to try to build a new community in the city's main park. Others formed gangs that extort whomever they can. A small handful hang on to civilization by walling themselves up in a large mansion or shutting themselves up in apartments, refusing to accept the changes Bellona has been through.Bellona has suffered a singularity. It's not clear why the city has become cut off from the rest of America; no television, no radio, no telephones. Strange things happen. A building catches fire and burns for days without being consumed. Two full moons appear on the rare day when the constant smoke clears. Landmarks appear to shift. A single bus route is still running, its driver going where and when he will.
The unnamed hero, who becomes known as Kidd, never helps the reader solve the riddle of Bellona. He knows little of his past but it seems he was once in a psychiatric hospital. He suffers blackouts that jar the novel's narration several times leaving more holes in the story rather than filling any. The third person narration is so closely tied to Kidd, that it becomes as unreliable as he is.
Though the bulk of Dhalgren takes place in a single location, it's essentially a road novel. Kidd moves from one set of characters to another as he moves through the city. He begins at the commune in the park where he meets Lanya, a girl he will form a close bond with as the novel progresses. He spends the night with Tak Lafour, an engineer who moved into the city after its fall and became a sort of wise old man, the guy others go to for advice. Tak knows the fallen city inside out. Kidd gets a job moving furniture for the Richards family who insist on maintaining appearances, pretending that everything is normal as everything around them slowly falls apart. Mr. Richard's leaves for work each morning, though no one knows where he spends his day. Mrs. Richard's runs the family's luxury apartment as she always did, serving empty soup bowls at dinner time in a strange charade of the family dinner.
Kidd has found a notebook, filled with someone's diary about the city. He uses the blank pages and margins to write poetry of his own which is published in a small edition halfway through the novel by the city's main celebrity Roger Calkins who keeps a large, walled mansion filled with celebrity guests from the outside world. One of them, a poet, takes an interest in Kidd and encourages his writing. By the end of the novel, Kidd has fallen in with a street gang, the Scorpions, who wear mirrored disks that create holographic disguises. Kidd forms a family, reuniting with Lanya after the commune in the park breaks up, who becomes his girlfriend. The two are joined by Denny, a teenager who shares their bed.
What to make of all this? Should on even try to make anything?
Science fiction author and fan of the novel, William Gibson, has said that Dhalgren is "a riddle never meant to be solved." But it's human nature to solve riddles, even when there is no solution.
Some possibilities:
In the midst of this massive, post apocalyptic science fiction novel, Kidd is writing poems. Here Dhalgren becomes an extended meditation on the creation of art, how art works, where it comes from, how it suffers when it becomes a commodity, how the artists must finally face the reaction of the public. Not something I expected to find in a science fiction novel.
Though published in 1975, Dhalgren is a product of the 1960's; the influence of the hippie movement on it is clear. It can be read as a critique of the changes American society during that decade. The commune in the park Kidd finds when he first arrives in Bellona is a hippie paradise. Golden Gate Park 1968. The Summer of Love. The commune runs as a collective, everyone helps with the food, the maintainence of their camp and the construction of new shelters. The members move from partnership to partnership, without moral constraints. They are as free as anyone could be. The Richards, whom Kidd works for, don't know what to make of the commune nor of the changes their city has gone through. They insist on going on exactly like they always have. When their eldest son begins to question their way of life, they force him out and pretend he has died. Their daughter sneaks off to join the commune and to sleep with a radical black leader whenever she can. The commune falls apart, just as the hippie movement did. It ends in crime and exploitation without leaving any mark on the landscape, having failed to build any of the permanent structures they had planned.
There is much more in Dhalgren--as many solutions to its riddle as their are readers. I will be keeping my copy. I'm not sure if I'll ever re-read it--at 800 pages I make no promises--but if I do, I'm sure I find a new set of answers to its riddles. Dhalgren is that kind of book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kambrogi
It took me about a month to read this 801-page volume. A sci-fi adventure that explores an imaginary city in mid-America after a localized catastrophe that is never explained, it daringly skews much of what one expects from fiction. We don’t know the main character’s name (nor does he), the
Show More
writing style moves in and out of prose and poetry, the story ends where it began and one’s questions, on the whole, are never answered. The protagonist experiences life in a stream-of-consciousness series of episodes, where both time and reality are suspect, and the object of the journey is never clear. The book reminds me of both [Ulysses] and [Gravity’s Rainbow], in that it’s a multi-layered, myth-like tale. The difference, for me, was that here the characters are human and compelling, very well drawn, and thus charming or fascinating enough to sustain my interest. I enjoyed the book, and continue to meditate on its issues: race, reality, mental illness, gender, sexual preference, the writing life, the arts, music, light, politics, space exploration, violence, the military, the future, time, and on and on. William Gibson said it best in his comment that it is the “city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost 30 years …” And I among them. Show Less
LibraryThing member selfnoise
I find this novel extremely difficult to describe. Whenever I try to pin down just exactly what it's about, I realize that it's mirroring my own ideas back to me.
It's an extremely rare example of an experimental novel that succeeds so completely that it's hard to imagine anyone actually writing it.
It's an extremely rare example of an experimental novel that succeeds so completely that it's hard to imagine anyone actually writing it.
LibraryThing member kimpe
Many say that Dhalgren is near impenetrable to some people - I didn't find this to be the case at all. Delany's ability to build a world and shape characters around this world is amazing. The way these characters change and adapt through the novel is remarkable.This book is a bit of an older one
Show More
for a science fiction novel - written in the 70s - which usually, in my experience, makes books in this genre feel heavy and outdated, but this book is aging very well.It's not a book for everyone, though, that's for certain. Show Less
LibraryThing member mattresslessness
My hatred for this book is healthy and invigorating.
LibraryThing member Murphy-Jacobs
I've read this book three times since I first discovered Delany at the tender age of 17. Images from the book are now built into my brain and it stands as a sort of monolithic representation of...I'm not sure what, but other books I read are held up next to this one for comparison.
The book itself
A man who doesn't know himself wanders into a city cut out of the world, a city suffering from some unspecified disaster yet still trying to struggle on. This man meets various people, takes up an identity they assign him, and tries to make a life there. The people he meets are all trying to continue their lives in some way -- this is no Utopian story of people bravely banding together to overcome adversity. No, this is a story of people living along the continuum of denial and acceptance. They use sex, poetry, and aggression to deal (or not deal) with what ever has happened. Some dance. Some hide. Some just survive as best they can.
This is a "what if" story in the classic sense of science fiction. The "what ifs" are piled one upon another, building a weird edifice with an internal logic not easily understood but possible to simply accept.
The book is work. The book is fascinating and repellent, very dated in its 1960s hippy outlook and yet still reachable.
It's worth reading more than once.
The book itself
Show More
is a kind of dream, a long, complex, not understood dream, a thing of images and scents, faces and noises, open to interpretation but never quite pinned down. It's a difficult book in some ways, violent, sexually perverse, edgy even now (although many other authors have come to stand on that edge over the years). As to what it is about...A man who doesn't know himself wanders into a city cut out of the world, a city suffering from some unspecified disaster yet still trying to struggle on. This man meets various people, takes up an identity they assign him, and tries to make a life there. The people he meets are all trying to continue their lives in some way -- this is no Utopian story of people bravely banding together to overcome adversity. No, this is a story of people living along the continuum of denial and acceptance. They use sex, poetry, and aggression to deal (or not deal) with what ever has happened. Some dance. Some hide. Some just survive as best they can.
This is a "what if" story in the classic sense of science fiction. The "what ifs" are piled one upon another, building a weird edifice with an internal logic not easily understood but possible to simply accept.
The book is work. The book is fascinating and repellent, very dated in its 1960s hippy outlook and yet still reachable.
It's worth reading more than once.
Show Less
LibraryThing member little-gidding
This is one of the most bizarre, disturbing, beautiful, dense and fascinating novels I've ever read. I want to recommend it to everyone; however, I have to contain myself because it certainly won't appeal to everyone. For example, there are some pretty explicit sex scenes, and the style is David
Show More
Lynch meets David Foster Wallace meets T.S. Eliot. It's dense, it's weird, it gets denser and weirder, then it ends before you really figure out anything. Show Less
LibraryThing member librarianbryan
Wow. Either there is a fictional Midwestern city, Bellona, where some sort of environmental disaster has occurred and now space-time there is in flux, or there was a disaster in said city and the narrator has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and we experience things through his perspective. The
Show More
narrator in question can’t remember his name, but chances upon moniker “the Kid.” Also seemingly falling to place-time is Kid’s emergence within the half-abandoned city as its de facto poet laureate and chief gang leader. The relationship between the upper classes and rebellious gangs is amorphous due to the necessities of survival. The city becomes a laboratory for social experiments about sexuality, gender, race, class, violence, and mental health. The novel is metafictional and the relationship between reader/author, signifier/signified, intention/perception is all on the table. The line between the author and characters are blurred. We are never sure if Bellona constantly geographically shifting or Kid’s mind is shifting. We are never sure if things are happening by chance or whether Kid is willing them to happen. The novel is hyper-subjective, but I’m not sure if the narrator is Kid or the city of Bellona itself. Dhalgren is a fantastical carousel of possible meanings that Delany places devilishly on the blurry edge between figure and ground.The length of this book intimidates some readers, but Delany brings it all home in the end with a satisfaction you'd rarely get from get from other ergodic texts. Not that all that much is resolved, but meaning impregnates the text retroactively. The final sections of the book justify the picaresque structure of first three fourths. Dhalgren has been wrongly classified by many into the science fiction genre. Dhalgren is surreal, but its images to do not emerge from the unconscious. Its images are the nightmare traces of the structures of power revealed. In this way, Dhalgren is not an unconscious work, but a hyperconscious one. dhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhal Show Less
LibraryThing member matthewdaniels
A very weird book that sticks with you. The book feels like what one might sit down and write after a long night of weird dreams. Just as dreams can seem to have meaning but make no sense, so goes this book. It's worth reading if you are up for that kind of experience.
LibraryThing member DieDaily
Many books ask "what is art?", and so does Dhalgren, but it then provides solid clues, visceral demonstrations, and hard-core intellectual answers even. This sort of frontal attack on "art" was a first and a last in my experience of the SF genre. One suspects of any prose that is this rich and
Show More
detailed that it must be somewhat autobiographical, that the characters are in some way real people. Hands down, this is my very favourite SF fiction book of all time. I agree with other reviewers that "this book is not for everyone". Big time. But this book in not at all cryptic. Not to me, anyway. The allegory is straight-forward and easy to interpret; it's pretty obvious what the city of Bologna is and what's going on. Show Less
LibraryThing member andreablythe
Dhalgren was probably the most literary science fiction I have ever read. I suppose I say that because it had little to do with plot, in the sense that there really wasn't one. But the characters and their interactions are very interesting. Also, I really enjoyed looking at the way people try to
Definitely a book that will challenge people's ideas on sexuality, as well as race, gender, and how to define art. Some of it was rather intense for me to read, so I would not recommend this book to anyone who is easily offended.
Show More
assemble--not meaning--but some shape of a life from a society that has collapsed.Definitely a book that will challenge people's ideas on sexuality, as well as race, gender, and how to define art. Some of it was rather intense for me to read, so I would not recommend this book to anyone who is easily offended.
Show Less
LibraryThing member juncopard
I absolutely love this weird thing-would enjoy talking with some one else who is interested in my theory that it is a pretty straight up premonition of life in post-Katrina New Orleans.Some of the stuff in here is just chilling to read after the fact.I think he didn't realize it at the time,but he
Show More
was having an extended vision of life after the storm.A small example: the book BEGINS'...to wound the autumnal city.' and then the main character begins to walk OVER THE BRIDGE into the destroyed city...nifty! Show Less
LibraryThing member jamclash
Nothing I say, or possess in mind, body, or spirit could capture the effect this book had on me. It was overwhelming, engaging, dense, troubling, exciting. A second read is necessary, at least for me. This is not a bathroom or beach book. Soak yourself into it and do nothing else (except maybe eat
Show More
and excrete waste) until you turn the last page. Do not judge, consider, or criticize the book while you read. Just read it and let it happen. Have fun. Show Less
LibraryThing member Unkletom
Dhalgren is one of those books where I was left wondering if it was a “literary marvel and a groundbreaking work of American magical realism.” or a literary version of the emperor’s new clothes. Based on hundreds of glowing reviews and its placement high on most must-read sci-fi lists, there
I’m not so sure.
Weighing in at over 800 pages, much of what happens takes place in Bellona, a city devastated by some unknown calamity and follows the wanderings, adventures, discussions and passionate encounters of a homeless young man who cannot remember his name and assumes the moniker Kidd, or Kid depending where you are in the book. While Bellona and the people Kidd encounters are interesting, the book is essentially plotless with Delaney teasing readers frequently with inexplicable events and possibly profound insights that flutter just outside of the reader’s understanding.
Written in the mid-1970s , Dhalgren shares the aimlessness and lack of purpose that permeated that decade between the sexual revolution and the AIDS epidemic, when physical passion replaced the passion engendered by a sense of purpose. The conversations about such still-debated topics as race, gender and sexuality may have been groundbreaking and original when written but now seem to be shallow and selfish. Maybe the most profound thing Delaney says is his statement on page 685 that “balling a couple of dozen people in one night is merely a prerequisite for understanding anything worth knowing.”
William Gibson was known to say that Dhalgren is a riddle never meant to be solved. Maybe it is, like Russia, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Or maybe, like several of the denizens of Bellona, the Emperor has no clothes. Who’s to say?
Show More
are many who believe this is a classic. One reader in my discussion group said “It's enough to me that odd and interesting events happen, characters have interesting conversations/insights, and there are occasional hot sex scenes.”I’m not so sure.
Weighing in at over 800 pages, much of what happens takes place in Bellona, a city devastated by some unknown calamity and follows the wanderings, adventures, discussions and passionate encounters of a homeless young man who cannot remember his name and assumes the moniker Kidd, or Kid depending where you are in the book. While Bellona and the people Kidd encounters are interesting, the book is essentially plotless with Delaney teasing readers frequently with inexplicable events and possibly profound insights that flutter just outside of the reader’s understanding.
Written in the mid-1970s , Dhalgren shares the aimlessness and lack of purpose that permeated that decade between the sexual revolution and the AIDS epidemic, when physical passion replaced the passion engendered by a sense of purpose. The conversations about such still-debated topics as race, gender and sexuality may have been groundbreaking and original when written but now seem to be shallow and selfish. Maybe the most profound thing Delaney says is his statement on page 685 that “balling a couple of dozen people in one night is merely a prerequisite for understanding anything worth knowing.”
William Gibson was known to say that Dhalgren is a riddle never meant to be solved. Maybe it is, like Russia, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Or maybe, like several of the denizens of Bellona, the Emperor has no clothes. Who’s to say?
Show Less
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
A surreal piece of post-apocalyptic fiction set in a single city. it is also a trek through the mind-set of the later 1960's as various almost-realized alternate societies rose for short periods and then failed to grow. we wander past a lot of these experiments as our hero attempts to decide where
Show More
to place his allegiance. Our unnamed hero has perfect mobility inside the city and seems amnesiac, except when he is relating incidents, sometimes as memories, and at others as fantasies. In addition the novel loops back to its beginning at the end of the book. I should reread this and see if it makes sense now. Show Less
LibraryThing member albertgoldfain
Melancholia and absurdism with hundreds of pages of content-free puddles of nothing. The recursive palimpsest with a circular structure is very clever, but working from this schema does not make Delany a James Joyce. I did like the meta musings on the act of writing.
LibraryThing member bongo_x
First let me just say that I usually hate the "stream of consciousness" style of writing (I also don't like poetry, in almost any form). So this would not seem to be a book for me, and in the end it wasn't.
There were long passages of poetic rambling and vague descriptions of vague things. This is
BUT... in between the filler a somewhat interesting book was happening, it was just really hard to find. I was intrigued enough that I kept slogging through it, but eventually I just found it to be too much. I didn't finish it, and I rarely do that either, although I'm learning to.
I still wish there was an edited version without some of the "I just took a hit and I'm going to tell you everything to goes through my mind" parts. It would be a much shorter book, and much better. Would it be good though? I don't know.
There were long passages of poetic rambling and vague descriptions of vague things. This is
Show More
the kind of stuff that makes me want to gouge my eyes out, so I ended up skimming pages. I never do that, ever. I mock people who do that. That's on par with fast forwarding through a movie, it automatically makes me think you're an idiot. But I did in this case and realized it wasn't making any difference.BUT... in between the filler a somewhat interesting book was happening, it was just really hard to find. I was intrigued enough that I kept slogging through it, but eventually I just found it to be too much. I didn't finish it, and I rarely do that either, although I'm learning to.
I still wish there was an edited version without some of the "I just took a hit and I'm going to tell you everything to goes through my mind" parts. It would be a much shorter book, and much better. Would it be good though? I don't know.
Show Less
LibraryThing member squim
okay, just listen, this book is huge. i'll be honest, i haven't finished it yet. but already it's one of the most original things i've read. to simply define it as "postmodern queer science fiction" isn't doing it justice.
LibraryThing member littlegeek
Why I love Dhalgren...I read it first in my 20's, when I read lots of scifi and fantasy. The last time I read it was when I first moved to Santa Cruz and was living in a communal household with a bunch of other witches. It definitely resonated. Evocative and haunting, with stunning imagery. Plus,
Show More
decades before Jonathan Safran Foer, the plot is a mobius strip. (so there) The image of the tree woman still haunts my dreams and there are non-judgmental depictions of aspects of the counterculture that just don't get discussed. If you hate hippies, skip it, but if you want to understand the 60's from someone who was there, pick it up. Show Less
LibraryThing member clong
I wanted to like this book, but in the end I came away from Dhalgren somewhat disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few stunningly imaginative moments in the book (the sun scene, many of the scenes with George, the mirror in the department store scene and subsequent discovery of a journal
What is Dhalgren about? Well on one level, it is about the really strange things that happen to an extremely strange guy when he visits an extraordinarily strange place. On another level it is about the urban idle young, slackers who see life as nothing more than sex, drugs, and hanging out (every generation has a group like that, right?). On still another level it is about the act of authoring; our protagonist The Kid, who can’t remember his real name, writes poetry and keeps a journal about his adventures in the mysteriously devastated city of Bellona, which journal we are to understand was later edited, at times with transparent clumsiness, into the book that became Dhalgren.
The book includes lots of sex and occasional moments of violence. I doubt that there is such a thing as a script for a no-holds barred XXX video (what would be the point?), but if such a thing existed, much of Dhalgren would be indistinguishable from it. Sex of just about any imaginable variety is described in substantial detail. Much of it will make most readers squeamish, and some of it would likely get you arrested (in most places, anyway). Perhaps Delany is trying to shock his reader? Eventually it reached a point where I found it mind-numbing and pointless.
There are times when the writing is deliberately self conscious, such as when scenes seamlessly move from third person to first person and back, or when blocks of texts recounting complementary or simply contemporaneous events are given side by side within a single page. I find Delany to be a really interesting writer, and I am glad that I read Dhalgren, but I can’t agree with those who consider it one of the great science fiction novels.
Show More
passage that eerily presaged it, the elevator shaft scene, many of the discussions of poetry, come to mind). But they are few and far between in a book that seemed to drag on forever at almost 900 pages. And Delany has certainly created an impressively large cast of strange characters, most of whom become at least somewhat sympathetic as the book progresses. What is Dhalgren about? Well on one level, it is about the really strange things that happen to an extremely strange guy when he visits an extraordinarily strange place. On another level it is about the urban idle young, slackers who see life as nothing more than sex, drugs, and hanging out (every generation has a group like that, right?). On still another level it is about the act of authoring; our protagonist The Kid, who can’t remember his real name, writes poetry and keeps a journal about his adventures in the mysteriously devastated city of Bellona, which journal we are to understand was later edited, at times with transparent clumsiness, into the book that became Dhalgren.
The book includes lots of sex and occasional moments of violence. I doubt that there is such a thing as a script for a no-holds barred XXX video (what would be the point?), but if such a thing existed, much of Dhalgren would be indistinguishable from it. Sex of just about any imaginable variety is described in substantial detail. Much of it will make most readers squeamish, and some of it would likely get you arrested (in most places, anyway). Perhaps Delany is trying to shock his reader? Eventually it reached a point where I found it mind-numbing and pointless.
There are times when the writing is deliberately self conscious, such as when scenes seamlessly move from third person to first person and back, or when blocks of texts recounting complementary or simply contemporaneous events are given side by side within a single page. I find Delany to be a really interesting writer, and I am glad that I read Dhalgren, but I can’t agree with those who consider it one of the great science fiction novels.
Show Less
LibraryThing member massha
I read through the whole 800+ pages. I shrugged. I might have got more excited about all the Hidegger-- Lev-Strauss-- whatever references when I was young and felt like there was some deep meaning behind such play. I no longer feel so; the whole thing just felt like a formalistic exercise. Plus,
Show More
the 70's hippy- or whatever it is- spirit with all the free love and no showers really grates on todays' germophobic sensitivities. I can see how the cosmos of my favorite author, William Gibson, might have some roots in the bleak despair shrouding Bellona, but it doesn't make Dhalgren any more interesting. Show Less
LibraryThing member bellarush
I read it when it first came out in the 70s. The New York Times reviewer gave it a rave review. I loved the book. But when I reread it a year ago, it all seems so dated. Still, a great read, which Delaney hasn't equaled since. Now if Delaney would only finish "Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of
Show More
Sand" I'd be happy. Show Less
LibraryThing member Lapsus16
I was told that this was "the book" to read and never look for another one. I may be too old, or disenchanted, but I found this pretty boring and repetitive. Good writing though.
LibraryThing member Ed.Jones
A turning point book for me. This is the first novel I did not complete and the first novel I threw away to save other from wasting their time.
I read this about 5 years ago and really don't remember many details but it boiled down some loser is wanding thru a hellish future world with no point or
Now if a book doesn't catch me in 50 pages, good bye. Too many great books to read. So in that respect Dhalgren did served a purpose.
I read this about 5 years ago and really don't remember many details but it boiled down some loser is wanding thru a hellish future world with no point or
Show More
plot. Maybe the book developed some plot after 100 pages but it just was not worth the time. Now if a book doesn't catch me in 50 pages, good bye. Too many great books to read. So in that respect Dhalgren did served a purpose.
Show Less
Awards
Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 1975)
Gaylactic Spectrum Award (Nominee — Hall of Fame — 2001)
Locus All-Time Best (Science Fiction Novel — 35 — 1998)
Language
Original publication date
1975-01
Physical description
896 p.; 7.2 inches
ISBN
0553085549 / 9780553085549