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Dhalgren

3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 · rating details · 3,529 ratings · 381 reviews

A mysterious disaster has stricken the midwestern American city of Bellona, and its aftereffects are disturbing: a city block burns down and is intact a week later; clouds cover the sky for weeks, then part to reveal two moons; a week passes for one person when only a day passes for another. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But...more

Paperback, 1st edition, 817 pages

Published July 15th 1996 by Wesleyan (first published December 28th 1974)

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Feb 17, 2008 Stevelvis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

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 to read the negative rev...more 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 to read the negative reviews by the people who just didn't get it or who were offended by its explicit sexuality. It seems that everyone there either gives it a 5-star rating or a 1-star rating with a note saying they'd give it no stars if possible.

I have found Dhalgren to be many things, mostly it's a search for self-identity by the main character, both in wanting to know his real name (other characters call him Kid or The Kid), and in finding out who he is through love, power and fame. It is an exploration of societal values, contrasting hippies in the city park to roving street gangs, each with their own hierarchy or power structure. It's an exploration of "family" with Kid and his triangle relationship with two lovers, a gay teenager and a straight woman, contrasted with an apartment building family for whom Kid does some work. And it's also a review of art, religion, friendship, sex, violence, and organization in the midst of anarchy. If New Orleans had simply been entirely walled off and forgotten after hurricane Katrina, then this is perhaps what it may have become. Add to that image elements of a disjointed acid trip through 1960s San Francisco and voila, you have Dhalgren.

It is a lesson in different writing styles, from the psychedelic writing that begins the book to the uber-realism in the middle and the anarchic scribbling in the margins at the end of the book and finally returning to the beginning in a literary moebius loop. And with almost 900 pages of small font in paperback, there are a lot of words.

Dhalgren is my favorite book of all time and I'm planning on reading it at least one more time before I die.... but there are so many books and so little time. If you like Dhalgren, you should definitely read Triton, which I have also read three times. Delany's autobiographical books Heavenly Breakfast and especially The Motion of Light In Water will show you how the author has actually lived a lot of what he has written. If you like his psychedelic writing style you should read Equinox although it is better described as a very kinky book of psychedelic pornography. His Neveryon series is of the fantasy genre and therefore doesn't compare to his science fiction writing style, although those books do continue his explorations of sex, sexuality, and power in social relationships. My favorite book in the Neveryon series was The Bridge of Lost Desire which was released during the very early years of AIDS and was the first popular novel to address the issue in its storyline. There are a few books written by Delany that I just don't like, for example Mad Man, but I do recommend absolutely everything he wrote from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s.

Fans of Delany should also read Sherri S Tepper, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr (real name Alice Sheldon), Ursula K LeGuin, Melissa Scott, Nancy Kress....
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Jun 05, 2007 Michael Alexander rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: pomos, queer theorists, 60s counterculture obsessees, open minded SF fans, joycean techno-dreamers

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 recall is e...more 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 recall is excellent, he forgets vast stretches of time and loses days, weeks, even years of his life) who gets called the Kid steps into a bizarre city where something has happened to bring its population down to 1,000 or so misfits who don't do much but gossip, the sky is covered in strange clouds and you never see the sun, two moons appear at night, and time sometimes runs differently for different people. He's searching for his name, and also something else, but his memory is so bad that he can't even remember that much. He finds a journal, snippets of which seem to tell his own story in advance, and starts to write his own story in the marginalia. He joins gangs, has lots and lots of unusual sex before and during his membership in a curious and sort of unsettling poly triad, becomes a poet but might just be plagiarizing the journal, and basically becomes the mythic center of everyone's life by sheer accident. Like Finnegans Wake, it has a sentence that wraps the end back into the beginning, and just like that book, there's a really strong reason to do so. As much as anything, though, it just has some gorgeous descriptions and an incredible mood, not to mention some musings on solitude, the mythologization of life, and the creation of art that are really cool.

Not to be forgotten, and precisely the fulcrum where Delany was writing both in and out of the genre pigeonhole from every direction he could. Fantastic, and neither as sometimes clunky as his earlier work or didactic as his later work (not that I don't love both, in their own ways). This one, he's content to just let be, in all its 800 page glory.(less)

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Feb 27, 2011 Kernos rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, fiction-classics, favorite-books-re-read

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 Kid was to writing.

I read Dhalgren fro...more

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May 03, 2007 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: the adventurous and not-easily-frustrated

Shelves: favorites

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 understand how De...more

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May 18, 2007 Ash rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, fiction

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 babble with no action, no on...more

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Mar 26, 2008 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of sci-fi literature who I'm not worried will think I'm a pervert

Recommended to Dan by: Chris

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 one of his favorites. So now, this book has a Buer and...more

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Sep 13, 2010 Avani rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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.

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Feb 15, 2008 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Tosh, W

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

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Apr 10, 2013 Simon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction-and-fantasy

Dhalgren, a book with a reputation that precedes it...kind of. More on that in a moment.

The book is more of an experience than a story. For me, it was a memorable and mixed affair I'm happy to have had but also happy to move on from. For others it's one they'll return to again and again trying to understand exactly what it was they read. In a way this echoes what the protagonist of the book goes through. If you do intend to read it I would try to go into it knowing as little about it as possible...more

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Jul 24, 2011 DoctorM rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 the face of Black Queer High-Lit Quasi-Pol...more

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Oct 26, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis marked it as the-value-of-a-dollar · review of another edition

Shelves: too-big-to-knot, 100-mccaffery-knotread

Up on top of the ice-cream swirl (raspberry) of recommendations from Friends Aloha and Jonathan (others certainly, too; announce yourselves!) sits the chocolate topping of one Garth Risk Hallberg, famous for driving up the price (that's appreciation!!! thank you, sir arthor danto) of the now overly infamous and still mostly unread Women and Men, his--Sir Garth's, that is--review and recommendation (which I've still not read, indeed) of Samuel R. Delany's really very long and apparently difficult...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Jenia Sukhan rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed

The greatest literary litmus test of the 20th century, Dhalgren is not simply "not for everyone" (read: pretentious) - it is a work of poor, lazy, and ultimately insulting craftsmanship.

Story, structure, characters, clarity be damned, the prose at least was supposed to be spectacular. One-of-a-kind. If nothing else did it for me in this alleged "love it or hate it" novel, the language, at least, should have left me in awe. What I found inside was a heinous and uninspired repetition of images, i...more

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Oct 23, 2010 Shirari Industries rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those interested in sexual identity and race politics circa 1974

Shelves: gender, scifi

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, as are the...more 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, as are the laws of physics in the strange city the characters inhabit. This makes for a very disorienting but novel read. However, at 801 pages, at times I found it hard to follow the story and relate to the characters. All of the experimentalness with so little real story-moving payoff for pages and pages got a little boring.

Where the book isn't dull, it's explicitly sexual and/or violent. Delany's protagonists are forging a new way of life that includes exploration of racial and ethnic and class identities, the roles of men and women, human consciousness and sanity, gender roles and expression, ideas about death and violence, and (often queer or polyamorous) sex with many kinks. This makes for some extremely detailed and challenging scenes that include slurs and other sexist and racist language, lots of sweat and grime and body fluids, problematic age differences between sex partners, and racially-charged rape games of questionable consensuality. However, it also has moments of tenderness, deeper consciousness and awareness, and healing. As well as gay leather daddies and gogo dancers. Basically there is a lot of sex and a lot of it may be the dirtiest (I mean actual dirt and grime, as well as raunch) such material you have ever read. John Waters would love it; I'm sure he has a copy.

It's pretty clear that for its time (it was written in 1974) this was an incredibly well-intentioned and radical book. It doubtless opened up space for people to claim identities and relationships that at the time had little public support.

Also of interest is the foreward to this 1996 edition, in which William Gibson (!) points out the connection between the burning city in Dhalgren, and the ephemeral other space created by collective countercultural will and action in the 1960s. I won't say anything else on this count to avoid spoilers, but if you're interested in the changing social mores of the '60s, you will find this a very compelling read.(less)

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Oct 07, 2009 Craig rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 "100 page rule" and read...more

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Sep 01, 2009 Nate D rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Nate D by: Kate, Lucy

Shelves: post-modernism, dystopiary, favorites, 70s-delerium

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 dilating asymptotic fade contracting sudden into action. Or perhaps...more

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Jan 13, 2009 Bryan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: downtherabbitholebookclub, all-time-fav-novels

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 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 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
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Nov 18, 2008 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: People who like reading about (hetero-, homo-, group, willing, semi-willing) sex.

Shelves: literary, fantastic, scientific, religious, genre

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 strike me as u...more

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Jul 10, 2012 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Rob by: John McDonald, Alana, Creighton

Shelves: science-fiction, own, project, vermont, 2009, apocalypse, important, 100-paperbacks

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 17, 2007 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Serious SF or Modernist Lit Readers

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) and Ernest Newboy,...more

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Dec 12, 2007 Tyson rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 Springfield...more

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May 13, 2013 Tim James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren's a challenging text, especially for those used to typical science fiction. But in its challenge we get a taste of what the genre can really achieve when in the hands of a masterful writer. Most important is Delany's spectacularly evocative prose; his writing feels like it could be in a science journal, not because of specialized jargon, but because it is completely without filler. There's no fat here, no rococo flourishes, just beautiful, evocative writing.
B...more Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren's a challenging text, especially for those used to typical science fiction. But in its challenge we get a taste of what the genre can really achieve when in the hands of a masterful writer. Most important is Delany's spectacularly evocative prose; his writing feels like it could be in a science journal, not because of specialized jargon, but because it is completely without filler. There's no fat here, no rococo flourishes, just beautiful, evocative writing.
Beyond the aesthetic pleasures of passing eyes over his sentences, there's a joy in tackling the challenges of the book. The challenges can, at risk of oversimplification, be described as either structural or political. Structural in that, like Malcolm Lowry's 'Under the Volcano', the end of the book can be read as the preface to the beginning of the story and on and on again. There's a reason why one of the later sections of the book is titled Palimpsest, as that's what the whole book is, and it bears a second reading immediately upon completion of the first one. It's politically challenging in that many of the characters create social forms and dynamics which were not the norm in the 1970s (the decade of publication) and still appear similarly unthinkable in much of contemporary America: non-heteronormative, skeptical of any intrinsic value to monogamy, etc.. There's not necessarily a privileging of the unorthodox ways of social organization, but neither are they denigrated; instead, they're deftly rendered in the simple elegance of his prose.
So if you're in the hunt for a book that redeems a genre (science fiction) all too often legitimately criticized as a ghetto for weakly developed characters, non-existent subtlety, and infantile wish-fulfillment, please consider giving SRD's Dhalgren a try. It's not the easiest read, but it's one of the most rewarding. In closing, it's the kind of book that you cannot help but come away from changed; to me, that's the highest praise I can give a work of art.(less)

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Feb 08, 2013 Roger Leatherwood rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A book that many people have many things to say about - largely influenced by when they encountered it in their lives. At first I hated and resisted this book but years later I was in the right frame of mind and ate it up like ice cream. I've since read it 3 more times, picking it up and starting spontaneously when I felt like I "had" to.

Here Delany finally (if imperfectly) figures out how theme informs plot, that the foregrounds change focus based on the preconceptions of the background setting...more

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Nov 13, 2012 Brandon Blackwell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mind-dissolving

Dhalgren is one of those books that makes you want to congratulate yourself just for actually finishing it. This is without a doubt one of the weirdest (and most difficult) books I have ever read, or probably ever will read. As cliche as this may be, Delany is the mad scientist of creative prose. I really can't think of a more apt description. The images his words conjure...I won't even try to do them justice here, all I can say is that if you're reading this, stop. Go and read just the first pa...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Robert rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: to-finish-later

This is a strange novel. It occupies a space in the mind where the characters interact without prompting, on dusty red streets with cryptic, muted conversations. No matter if you've finished or just started or never started it, the story is playing out right now, irrespective of the actual words on the page. A sort of Hard-Boiled schism where once infected the countdown timer has begun, ticking down to some unending unknown. Actually reading it seems redundant and more than a little scary.

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May 23, 2012 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was a truly mind-bending and eye-opening read for me. Experiencing the novel from Kid's tenuous mental state, while sometimes frustrating, forces the reader to further emphathize with him (sometimes you feel as confused as he seems to be.) The mixing of passages from Kid's notebook with passeges from the novel are a unique way of foreshadowing, making one wonder if you're getting a glimps into the future, remembering something from the past, or experiencing an hallucination with Kid.

I must...more

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Feb 07, 2012 Shaun Lawton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 streets in Bellona (the fictional city which is, at heart, the protago...more 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 streets in Bellona (the fictional city which is, at heart, the protagonist of the book as much as The Kid is) shift and change, are no longer named the same, turn in different directions, and become otherwise non-negotiable and dangerous to walk about upon.

What makes Delany's novel so compelling is that the author brings us along with our protagonist (who can't remember his name, and hence is only known as "The Kid") on his journey of self-discovery as he gets to know the inhabitants of the city of Bellona. As he discovers his penchant for writing poetry, we are taken along on a painstaking (and yes, "Joycean") tour-de-force examining the most close-up details of his experience, down to how and why he chooses certain words over others in the composition of his poetry. It is a sort of decomposition that reflects the inherent chaotic nature of the raging elemental, molecular storm going on that no one has the least clue as to its properties or significanse. A massive disaster novel whose intimate setting is the human heart and the communicative process -- DHALGREN has changed generations of readers who were unwittingly hooked in from page one, and dragged through a splintering, visionary excursion into an inner, violent world of self-realization. It is the novel that exposed me to the viral force of Samuel Delany -- perhaps our most learned (and certainly amongst our most talented) man of letters.

To read Delany is to take the ultimate challenge in confrontational, symbolic meaning in fiction. He razes contemporary structures of language & reconstructs them into pristine, crystal clear passages of prose that may perplex at first glance, but if merely concentrated upon, will unfurl within the mind's eye devastatingly focused ideas.

But as William Gibson suggests in his introduction to the new oversize edition of Dhalgren, "I distrust few things more deeply than acts of literary explication", I will therefore say no more, so that in the end, it remains up to you, dear reader, to take that brave first step into the leaf-swirled surrounds of the city of Bellona. If and when you do -- remember that you are not going in alone.
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Dec 27, 2011 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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Nov 25, 2011 Jeroen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction-soft

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 to see this book...more

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Nov 12, 2011 Paige rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: postapocalyptic, specfic, lgb, genre, recs

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 won't. My gl...more

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Oct 18, 2011 Gregory Huish rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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, stream of though...more 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, stream of thought, impulse, vitality, and darkness.

As a somewhat morbid fan of post apocalyptic fiction I related internally to this destroyed and forsaken city where people chose to stay and live, impulsively from moment to moment, consumed by their own psychoses, failings, and/or strengths. The absurd throughout is delicious, for instance when Kid goes to work or 5 dollars an hour in a city where everything is laying around or as he loses memory randomly and acts on the total need to experience whatever is at hand but forgetting his purpose.

The graphic sexuality is not a hindrance to the story, but serves to place it in what I see as the realm of the reactive. There is light interplay of social structures and behaviors more or less reminiscent of the era during which it was written but for the most part all characters are acting on a fairly barbaric and basic level. Among that barbarism there are the flavors of order like Calkin's manor, the insane family that pretends nothing is amiss, the monastery, the bar that continues to operate for free. The whole book is a tableau more so than anything I have ever read. That's where the magic of Dhalgren lies.

I disagree with a lot of reviewers that the characters were dull. On the contrary they were so real to me, maybe not exciting or fast paced but completely convincing. The absurdity of the ending actually broke my heart (relating to Lanya and Denny). But I suppose that is what it is.

At any rate, its an experience not to be missed by any thinker or feeler. I would still hesitate to recommend this to most people I know just because the content is so raw and we're all so sheltered.
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About Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7t...more Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.(less)

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“You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.” — 37 people liked it

“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.” — 13 people liked it

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