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Sep 04, 2011

Stevelvis rated it:

Dhalgren, by Samuel R Delany, has been my favorite book since I first read it in 1979. I have read it twice more since then and every time I've read it I got something different out of it. I've given the book away as gifts to several people but I don't think any of them appreciated it (oh well).

I recommend that y'all go to Amazon and read some of the reviews of Dhalgren there. It is interesting to read the long positive reviews by the "smart" people and it's also a laugh More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Michael rated it:

This book is a whole world, part of the constellation of works that help me navigate my intellectual life. It's about the 60s, but it's also about metafiction, about solitude, and about that strange feeling when the dull and the surreal merge (late, late at night. when life has gotten one step too strange. when one more trudge down the street puts you into a reverie where you feel utterly lost).

In it, a nameless guy with a faulty memory (that's why he's nameless--though otherwise his More...

0 comments like (17 people liked it)

Feb 27, 2011

Kernos rated it:

to wound the autumnal city ... I have come to

Dhalgren is the

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
—TS Elliot

This is a difficult book to review, difficult to put one's thought's and feelings into words, the written word is perhaps insufficient to the task (a meme of this novel, I think). Following are some random thoughts.

Overall I found it engaging, for reasons I cannot express; I was compelled to get back to reading, as compelled, perhaps as The Ki More...

2 comments like (10 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Ben rated it:

It's tough to review a favorite book, especially when it's a book that almost completely changed the way you view literature. But I suppose it's worth a shot.

Dhalgren is a glorious mess, but that's not to say that it lacks structure. In fact, I wrote my senior thesis in undergrad on the narrative structure of the novel, and upon close examination it's stunning just how carefully put together the whole thing is. Everyone knows that it's an imperfectly closed loop, but few really under More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

May 29, 2011

Sherri rated it:

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 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 More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Ash rated it:

Dhalgren is a terrible work of genius. By that, I mean that the mechanical writing of the text is brilliant and falls into the category of masterpiece. It is also a terribly dull read.

The structure of the novel is amazing: the narrative loops, the integration of mythology, the accurate portrayal of psychosis, the dazzling postmodern language, etc. Absolutely stunning work.

Of course, the characters are unbelievably boring, the story is filled with lots of meaningless babb More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Mar 26, 2008

Dan rated it:

I read this book because my home boy Buer from high school recommended it. And then my old roomie Jimbo gave me his copy of this book at his wedding. The conversation went like this:

Me: "I'll get this back to you when I'm done reading it."
Jim: "That won't be necessary. I never want to see this book again."

Quite ominous... The copy of the book I read had a forward by William Gibson. He is one of my favorite authors, and he cited this book as More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Avani rated it:

I passionately hated this book. The additional star is for some neat Greco-Roman allusions, but that's pretty much the only saving grace. This book has been called a "riddle that was never meant to be solved" and that pretty much sums up what makes it so awful. It's stream of consciousness drivel without a consistent direction. It is Joyce without the writing skill and Keats without the poetry. In short, you've been warned.

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 15, 2008

David rated it:

The great gay hippie masterpiece. A vision of urban life as an alternate universe. Seductive. Drug-like. Perfect.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 24, 2011

DoctorM rated it:

I read a lot of Samuel R. Delany's sci-fi when I was young, and all the way up through "Einstein Intersection" (aka "A Fabulous, Formless Darkness") and "Nova", I loved his work. Yet...somewhere around "Triton" he went badly off the rails. The same kind of thing happened to Piers Anthony and Roger Zelazny, but it their cases it was simply the lure of quick, large paychecks for Bad Fantasy Novels. Delany...fell into another trap. He positioned himself as th More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 30, 2011

Shirari rated it:

Dhalgren has an unusual structure and a high level of violence. I had a difficult time getting through it. Even so, I'm glad I hung in there - the book holds an important place in the sci fi canon and it's justified. It was a very unusual read, experimental and interesting. Delany does a lot of things that I haven't seen before.

As in Nabokov's Pale Fire, Dhalgren plays with the line between character and author. The mental state of the this unreliable narrator is in constant question More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 04, 2010

Craig rated it:

I really loved the language, some of the characters, and the strong sense of setting in this book. Delany draws you in and is absolutely captivating with his style but holy crap was this book brutally pointless. Just wandering around with no real structure or reason for being. There's lots of grime, gloom, violence, and sloppy sex (both gay and straight). All that's fine, I suppose, but you have to give us a reason for staying with it.

I actually went twice as far as my "10 More...

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 08, 2010

Nate rated it:

Revision.

This might turn out to be one of those reviews I write over and over.

Perhaps such a novel -- equal parts fine-focused lens, social/personal mirror, and harshly distorting prism -- just demands this endless rethinking.

So what is Dhalgren?

It is a deft cultural analysis, part perfectly current, part more dated 60s/70s scrutiny that is nonetheless perceptive and interesting.

It is a probing of time and perception laid out in dilatin More...

6 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2009

Bryan rated it:

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 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 an More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 18, 2008

Andrew rated it:

My rating is based on how much I admire the book; if I were rating for enjoyment, I'd probably give it four stars. An 800-page-long catalogue of fighting, fucking, and philosophy wears a little thin, especially when it's mostly fucking.

I don't really know what to say about Dhalgren. Even though I think Delany may have failed to achieve his goal, it was so lofty that the result is still breath-taking. There are some moments that will stick with me forever, I think, and some of them More...

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Jan 19, 2009

Stephen rated it:

I just finished this book. Dhalgren is a wild sci-fi tome about a post-apocalyptic American city and the gangs and "normal" people who live there. The main character is a bisexual dude with a case of amnesia both retro and antero. He goes by the name of "The Kid" and though initially he is more of a down-to-earth hippie sleeping under the stars and doing odd jobs, he gradually becomes dragged into the anarcho-punk gangbanger lifestyle.

Of course who really knows? T More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 17, 2007

Chris rated it:

It's a tough call as to whether this is a 4 or 5 star book (rating things in such restrictive terms is hard enough to begin with...). While this book does have some flaws, it is nonetheless a remarkable meditation on a multitude of themes and has many passages of absolutely amazing prose. The first page contains one of my favorite paragraphs written in English. It is also the quintessential example of the application of techniques of (high) modernism to SF material.

The Kid(d) More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Dec 12, 2007

Tyson rated it:

I couldn't resist the book when Jonathan Letham claimed that Delany was writing American Magic Realism ( a partially justified claim) and with a forward by William Gibson, I figured I'd give it a try. It covers a general them I'm fascinated with, that of cities and puzzles. The city is a fisctional city in America that constantly re-combines itself. the ciiy changes overnight and there is a certain eeriness to the story as the author never quite divulges which city it could be (like Springfie More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 07, 2012

Shaun rated it:

DHALGREN, by Samuel R. Delany

"to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind"

Thus begins a sprawling, 700+pg surrealistic odyssey depicting one man's journey into a city cut off from the rest of the world by an undisclosed "reality storm" that has isolated major cities from each other, and disrupted the very fabric of time + space, so that at certain times, certain st More...

0 comments like

Dec 27, 2011

David rated it:

This was an important book for me because it came to me at a confusing time, and helped me revel in the confusion rather than fight it. I'm pretty sure than Delany failed to do some of the things he was trying to do with this book. But he succeeded spectacularly in many other ways. Dhalgren is ambitious and unconventional. I liked this book so much that I wanted to identify myself with it. This is funny to me now, because the book itself is a veritable morass of identities. Because of its unique More...

0 comments like

Nov 25, 2011

Jeroen rated it:

While the setting sounded truly interesting, I would hardly call this book a page-turner. It is not here to be experienced as a story with head and tail, but, as many before may have mentioned, as a circle that encloses your brains and makes you wonder...
That is, if you manage to read until the end of the (material) novel, which could be bothersome, for Delaney sets so many things in motion that make you wonder... "what has this to *do* with the story?" Yet I found it convenient t More...

0 comments like

Nov 14, 2011

Perry rated it:

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, a professor who I studied under at Temple, is about a 27 year old known as Kid who's lost his memory and finds himself in a strange city called Bellona.

I really enjoyed this. Bellona suffers from a lot of the same problems that - at least what my limited view sees as - East Coast American city's problems. Like racial tension, poverty, crumbling infrastructures, etc. It was really cool. I've never read a sf novel like this but I also must admit that I s More...

0 comments like

Nov 12, 2011

Paige rated it:

I didn't think I'd like this. It's as dense as a fruitcake and uses images and language and ideas that are sometimes pretty damn repugnant. But I did. It's...imbued with a queer sensibility, and despite not being usually very good with experimental fiction, I found that queerness and the realism of characters that eat/sleep/screw/shit/piss to be almost refreshing.

There isn't much to say about it in a wee review such as this, other than that you'll either get something from it or you wo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 18, 2011

Gregory rated it:

I gave this five stars based on how it impacted my life and thought process. That's important to me in a book. I take what I read with me, or sometimes want the book to take me away from where I read...

If one can say anything about Dhalgren; it is incredibly engrossing. I couldn't look away (perhaps not only physically but psychologically as well) from what was going on in those pages. Heck I craved it. Delany takes you to a world that I found comforting. Its a mix of absurdism, More...

0 comments like

Sep 18, 2011

Lord rated it:

Picked up this book because I'd read Delany was very good and this was possibly his magnum opus. William Gibson, one of my favorite authors of all time, was recommending it on the cover, so I knew I had to read it.

I was sorely disappointed. Writing this review years after reading it, I can say I recall little from the book except being thoroughly unimpressed. There was some fun typesetting of paragraphs a la Alfred Bester, but other than than, a giant shrug.

The main c More...

0 comments like

Sep 22, 2009

Brad rated it:

It is difficult to approach a book as widely praised and remarked upon as Dhalgren.

The cover has quotes from William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, for God's sake. Luxurious praise surrounds the work like a corona: It's baffling, prescient, postmodern, premodern, an enigma, a sexual challenge, and on and on.

Many reviews compare it to David Foster Wallace, or Borges, in terms of length and circular structure.

So, in short, I came to the work with many preconce More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2010

El gato rated it:

this is absolutely one of the best books i have ever read.

i may be one of the few out there, but i actually really enjoy REALLY long books. to me it provides you with the opportunity to really get to know the characters, and it allows to progress the story in a way that shorter books can't. i remember being half way through and being a little sad that i only had 400 more pages to go.

the style of writing is superb. up until reading Dhalgren i thought Cortazar's Rayuela (ho More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 01, 2011

El rated it:

I finished this book this morning, and I just haven't managed to find the words to write a proper review. I still can't quite decide between 3, 4, or 5 stars. I started re-reading the first few pages when I finished, and just now read some more of the book - this time at random places in the text.

I don't know what I expected when I started this, but purposely didn't get excited since the whole science fiction genre and I are so hit-or-miss most of the time. I also heard this is li More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 03, 2010

Tom rated it:

Somewhere in the middle of the United States, the city of Bellona suffers a catastrophe. Fires burn, a cloud of smoke enshrouds the city, ninety-eight thousand of the city's one hundred thousand inhabitants flee.
he remaining two thousand live in an anarchical environment where time, weather and space are, or seem to be, unhinged from their moorings.
Enter The Kid, a twenty-seven year old (who looks younger) metally unstable man who can't remember his name. The Kid comes More...

0 comments like

Jan 13, 2009

Corvidae rated it:

Never. Read. This book.

Ok, I should be a bit more intelligent. I read it for a class focusing on race and gender issues in scifi, many books by non-canonical (i.e. not white male) authors. I can appreciate what it tries to do. I can appreciate it for its unique and askew looks at culture and class and identity.

But its impossible to read. There are easier-to-read books that deal with the same sorts of issues (I recommend Octavia Butler and Karen Traviss' original work in More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)