Titus Groan
This is the first of the Gormenghast trilogy and introduces the reader to Gormenghast Castle and its inhabitants. Lord Sepulchrave the Earl of Groan, his life an endless succession of meaningless rituals, Countess Gertrude, who spends her days secluded in her bedroom surrounded by cats and birds, her only source of pleasure. Their daughter Fuschia is there too, along with Sepulchrave’s eccentric twin sisters, Cora and Clarice and Mr. Flay, who leads Lord Sepulchrave through the interminable rituals of the castle. Into this world are thrust Titus, heir to the Earldom and Steerpike, a Machiavellian kitchen boy on the make.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
14mentions
13people
2009–2026years
71% recommend21% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I really enjoyed Josiah Bancroft's Babel series: start with Senlin Ascends. I feel like he enjoys writing sentences -- a strange way to put it, but, I think he does. But this is an extraordinary book on its own.
For the ultimate in non-basic vocab, try Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
The English translation of Metro 2033 is amazing. You can feel the stylistic differences originating in the Russian language, and it's a very evocative horror story with slightly longer sentences and richer language than ordinary books.
Both the Babel books and Metro 2033 (especially) were inspirations for me, writing my novel. And Wolfe is one of my literary heroes, one of the most amazing writers I have ever read. Every one of his novels is rewarding, often through not just language but complexity of plot and narrator. He uses unreliable narrators a lot; beautifully, in one of his series the narrator has amnesia and cannot remember what occurred the previous day, so writes notes to himself. (Soldier of the Mist. Also rewarding once you figure out the name and location references.)
An older classic: Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan is extraordinary in language, but also in the rhythm of sentences. Definitely one written to be read with a voice, not just internally.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville has dense prose. Wonderful book, very rewarding to read.
- In no particular order, except that #1 is #1.
1. Adventures of Huckelberry Finn
2. Little, Big
3. Winter's Tale
4. Titus Groan
5. Gormenghast
6. Titus Alone
7. Dune
8. The manuscript found in saragossa
9. The Three Musketeers
10. A Scanner Darkly
11. The Man in the High Castle
12. Do Androids dream of Electronic Sheep
13. Ubik
14. Valis, basically almost every book by Phil Dick.
15. Life on the Mississippi.
16. The Garden of Forking Paths
17. Dhalgren
18. The Gods of Pegāna, basically all the fantasy work of Dunsany.
19. The Lathe of Heaven. Anything by LeGuin.
20. Their Eyes Were Watching God
21. The Master and Margarita
22. The Gulag Archipelago
- For what it's worth, the following three stories/novels have that effect on me. There's something about them that seems surreal and foreign, a little magical.
- The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster
- Erewhon, Samuel Butler
- The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
The styles and formats are completely different. The only common thing I can think of is that there's this invisible guiding force in all of them, whether it's good or bad. The Machine Stops is a dystopia about technology in absence of a soulful humanity. Erewhon is wild. Truly wild. It has to be a genre all its own, something akin to Darwinian technopunk. The Alchemist is probably one of those novels you could riff on with a yoga instructor and have a good conversation :joy:. It's classical magical surrealism, but it's a good story about a person's lifetime journey. Nothing deep, but it's wholesome.
Edit: also will add A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr., and Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
- For a fantasy classic, you could try John Crowley's Little, Big, which was reputedly the late lit critic Harold Bloom's favorite novel. Bloom notoriously hated most fantasy novels - the Harry Potter series in particular - so that's a noticeable endorsement.
For an older fantasy series, you could also try Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (starts with Titus Groan), which actually predates the Lord of the Rings and has a crowd that thinks it's better written. I think Neil Gaiman has worked on a TV series adaptation.
- It's worth providing the context in which CS Lewis praised 'A Voyage to Arcturus:' it's in a list of what he considered the best mythopoeic fiction. The quote below is from Lewis' essay 'On Science Fiction,' available e.g. in his collection 'Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories'
> Specimens of this kind [of fiction], at its best, will never be common. I would include parts of the Odyssey, the Hymn to Aphrodite, Much of the Kalevala and The Fairie Queene, some of Malory (but none of Malory's best work) and more of Huon, parts of Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Beckford's Vathek, Morris's Jason and the Prologue (little else) of the Earthly Paradise, MacDonald's Phantastes, Lilith, and The Golden Key, Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work, David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus. Also Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.
- Thanks for posting this. I had no idea this even happened. As you're surely aware, in 1966, Pynchon was still only 29 (an incredible fact, at least to me), so that might explain the lack of subtlety.
Another great namer was Mervyn Peake, author of the fabulous "Gormenghast" series. From it, we have:
Lord Sepulchrave Groan
Fuschia Groan
Titus Groan
Steerpike
Swelter, the enormous chef
Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor
Mr. Flay
...and too many more to mention. Any lovers of literary, surrealist grotesquerie should read this series.
