The atrocity exhibition
First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of Crash and Super-Cannes, who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition.
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10people
2016–2026years
55% recommend45% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- I'll add some recommendations to the author's list, as I have found that reading difficult literature (both fiction and non-fiction) has been like exercising a muscle for me. For example, I read Blood Meridian before doing this and then again after doing it for a few years, right after McCarthy passed away, and it was a night and day difference in how "difficult" the prose was.
A few things I think fit into the "short little difficult books":
Borges is not someone I consider too difficult, but many do for the same reason the author mentioned people finding Calvino to be difficult. His works require that you invest some curiosity into thinking about the scenarios in his fiction. He also plays with the nature of the narrative of the story in a sometimes postmodern way that is still accessible. None of his works are longer than 20 pages or so, so not a huge time investment. I would recommend buying the Penguin "Collected Fictions" edition. It contains a collection of books of stories, and I would recommend prioritizing reading the Fictions and The Aleph collections first. Some of his popular stories to start with would be "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel", and "The Immortal". If you want slightly more sentimental, "The Circular Ruins" is wonderful. If you want dryer, more satirical and postmodern, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is hilarious.
If you want a book that plays with the basic structure of a "novel", Nabokov's Pale Fire is a great read and a good introduction into what the technique of an unreliable narrator can truly achieve. No matter how out-there you think your interpretation of it is, if you look into published literary analysis of it, the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you might think.
Gene Wolfe is highly regarded among science fiction fans, and for good reason. While he's best known for his Solar Cycle, a set of a dozen novels, I think that the best introduction to him can be found in his short stories. They might not seem difficult at first, but some of them, especially Seven American Nights, Forlesen, and the trio of stories in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, are similar to Pale Fire insofar as they are far more than they seem on the surface. They require some degree of scrutiny and interpretation from the reader. I wish I had read them before his bigger novels, as I found reading those novels was so much more rewarding after learning how to read Wolfe from his short stories. If you want to buy a few short story collections, there's going to be some unavoidable overlap, but I would recommend "The Best of Gene Wolfe" (for The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, The Death of Dr. Island, Forlesen, Seven American Nights, Death of the Island Doctor), "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories" (Tracking Song, The Doctor of Death Island), and "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" for its three novellas.
If you want something much more difficult, try J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. He was influenced by Burroughs (Naked Lunch would be another recommendation here if you can stomach the Beatnik depravity within) and wrote a novel that will challenge its reader in many ways. It's very interesting to go straight from this into Crash, which covers a lot of the same material in a less difficult structure. Baudrillard praised Crash with "After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation", but I would say The Atrocity Exhibition deserves this praise(?) just as much, even if it's much rougher around the edges. Certainly, the political stunt pulled using one of its sections (called Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan) belong more to the Situationists' games than Baudrillard's universe of simulation, but the stunt relies just as much on the hyperreal breakdown of signifiers as anything Baudrillard even pointed to.
- Ballard's fiction is great. I'm partial to the early novels (The Crystal World is one of my favourites) and to his short stories.
In his longer works, Ballard's ideas often wore a bit thin. In particular, his late novels (Cocaine Nights, etc.) are the longest — beautifully written, sure, but they are essentially reskinned versions of his earlier High-Rise and Running Wild, where he already perfected the motif of humans in gated communities reverting to base, animal, violent behaviour. We didn't really need those; he'd already made his point.
I do recommend getting his "The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard" (not to be confused with "The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1" and "Volume 2", both of which it supercedes). It includes classics such as "The Concentration City", "Studio 5, The Stars", "A Question of Re-Entry", "Billenium", and "The Garden of Time".
While I've always enjoyed Ballard's coldly satirical perspective on modern life (The Atrocity Exhibition maybe being the pinnacle of this), I think he's at his best when he gets looser and a bit weird. Nature succumbing to strange mutations feature in The Drowned World, but The Crystal World is absolutely supercharged with hallucinogenic weirdness, a fever dream that turns magical-realist in the end. Later novels touch on this man/nature dichotomy, but not as strongly as his earlier work, although late short stories like "Dream Cargoes" revisit that theme.
- The Atrocity Exhibition is a strange book: I both found it very hard to read and utterly enthralling and fascinating.
- To save you some scripting:
Alan Moore - dystopian graphic novel V for Vendetta (serialized 1982–1989) Alejandro Jodorowsky Jean Giraud (Moebius) - graphic novel The Incal (1980–1988) Anna Kavan - Ice (1967). Anne McCaffrey - The Ship Who Sang (1969) Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Пикник на обочине (1972; Piknik na obochine; translated as A Roadside Picnic) Barry N. Malzberg - Beyond Apollo (1972) Brian Aldiss - Barefoot in the Head (1969) Brian Aldiss - Greybeard (1964). Chester Anderson - The Butterfly Kid (1967) Christopher Priest - Inverted World (1974) Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia (1975, in complete form). David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) Frank Herbert - Dune (1965) Frank Miller - graphic novel Rōnin (1983–1984) Gary Panter - comic Jimbo (serialized 1977–present) Gary Panter - comic strip Dal Tokyo (1983–2007) Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) Harlan Ellison’s (ed.) Dangerous Visions (1967) Jack Kirby - Fourth World comics (1971–1974). Jack Kirby - pre-Fourth World sci-fi comics (1964–1970) James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World (1978) Jane Gaskell - A Sweet, Sweet Summer (1969) J.G. Ballard - Crash (1973) J.G. Ballard - High-Rise (1975) J.G. Ballard - The Atrocity Exhibition (written 1967, published 1970) J.G. Ballard - The Burning World (1964) J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World (1966) Joanna Russ - We Who Are About To… (serialized 1976; in book form, 1977) John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar (1968). John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up (1972) John Crowley - Engine Summer (1979) John Crowley - The Deep (1975). John Sladek - Roderick at Random (1983) John Sladek’s - The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra - Judge Dredd adventures Block Mania (serialized 10/31/1981 to 12/26/81) and The Apocalypse War (1/2/82 to 6/26/82). Josephine Saxton - The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969) Katsuhiro Otomo - manga series Akira (1982–1990) Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) Michael Moorcock - The English Assassin (1972) M. John Harrison - The Pastel City (1971) Moebius-s Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage, 1976–1979) Octavia E. Butler-s Kindred (1979) Octavia E. Butler - Wild Seed (1980) Philip K. Dick - A Maze of Death (1970) Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly (1977) Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip (1964) Philip K. Dick - Now Wait for Last Year (1966) Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) Philip K. Dick - The Unteleported Man (1966) Philip K. Dick - Ubik (1969). Philip K. Dick - VALIS (1981) Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar (1968). Robert Heinlein - Friday (1982). Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside (1972) Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light (1967) Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker (1980) Samuel R. Delany - Babel-17 (1966). Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren (1975) Samuel R. Delany - Nova (1968) Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection (1967) Samuel R. Delany - Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) Stanislaw Lem - Ze wspomnien Ijona Tichego Kongres futurologiczny (The Futurological Congress, 1971) Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration (1968) Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Ursula K. Le Guin - Rocannon's World (1966) Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974). Ursula K. LeGuin - The Lathe of Heaven (1971) Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor (1969) Vonda N. McIntyre - Dreamsnake (1978) Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins (1971) William Burroughs - Nova Express (1964) - Nice to see that gore-sploitation films appeared right at the start. After all, there were plenty of completely nude women in earliest films, though those were pretty tame—but afaik porn followed in a couple decades or so, when film stopped costing more than a live tour.
By the way, regarding ‘L’arrivée...’, Wikipedia says that Lumieres attempted 3D films even before getting properly started with flat ones. So, considering that accounts from that time were of quite meh quality, it's possible that the running-out occurred at a 3D showing, making the ‘illusion’ story more plausible.
Lastly, since J.G. Ballard is mentioned, I'll say that both ‘Crash’ and ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ are very cool. Aside from obvious connotations to real people's habits, just the atmosphere of the books is engrossing in the weirdest way. They tickle the brain in a manner that's only similar to what I experienced in childhood, when the world was big and anything could be in it—only, these books are for adults. I don't think they quite make surrealism like that anymore. Kobo Abe and animator Piotr Kamler are contemporaries that are somewhat similar in effect; Cronenberg's ‘Videodrome’ is likewise good (however his ‘Crash’ doesn't really have the feel). Of later stuff, Bret Easton Ellis is proficient in such immersion, and funny enough has a pair ‘American Psycho’-‘Glamorama’ that are close in the themes to each other but are related in execution like the two books of Ballard's, and likewise the film is its own thing by necessity.
Of very current authors, I know only Vladimir Sorokin who can pull off such feats—but his thing is that he can do what he wants with Russian language, and as a result is next to untranslatable. Apparently there's a dude who took on the challenge with English as the target, and several books at once are going to be published very soon (this year, they said)—I'm looking forward to diving in that the first chance I get, but my expectations are high and the outlook cautious.
- I'm the opposite — I wish there were more writers who were capable of writing with the same kind of rich texture as Gibson.
J. G. Ballard comes close; The Atrocity Exhibition is very Gibsonesque in places, though with a much bleaker sense of alienation than anything Gibson wrote. Cormac McCarthy is also great, though not like Gibson at all.
People seem to like Neal Stephenson's early work (Snow Crash in particular), but I was always put off by his apparent plagiarizing of Gibson's style.
Edit: Also James Ellroy.
