My favorite books are the ones I don’t fully understand. I admire a thread of uncertainty, something enigmatic and esoteric, as if the edges of the story are just out of reach. I respect the push and pull of a book, drawing the reader in while offering just enough resistance that there’s work involved, a challenge to the reader’s imagination and sense of wonder. This might be the story itself or the form the story takes, but I know it’s special when I catch myself thinking, “I don’t exactly know what the author is up to, but I love it.”
I wanted my novel, Lesser Ruins, to feel at ease getting lost, to relish in its obsessions and procrastinations, from long descriptions of electronic music to digressions about coffee to the strange, suffocating world of academia. I won’t claim the reader will get lost (I have a stubborn and innate tendency for clarity), however, I hope the density of the prose lends itself to a place ripe with possibility, a region where the reader is encouraged to meander.
I was striving for a book about grief (and avoiding it). A book about the creative process (and avoiding it). As a species we’re highly skilled at the art of avoidance and sometimes that route takes us to the most interesting places. The books on this list either directly influenced Lesser Ruins or spoke to me in ways that, in hindsight, are as mysterious as the initial impulse is to create.
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This is a novel dense with memory and internal monologue. With stunning prose (and an incredible translation by Charlotte Mandell), we find the narrator going nowhere, yet the book goes everywhere. Insomnia was never so rich and rewarding.
The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernándo Mallo
A strange, digressive book that feels like a lost David Lynch film. I followed the same three-paragraph structure for Lesser Ruins.
The Fountains of Neptune by Rikki Ducornet
Ducornet is an American treasure, and this is only one of a dozen-plus books I could’ve chosen, a novel where the language keeps me invested, even when I’m not exactly sure what’s happening. It’s funny, strange, generous, and, outside of Moby Dick, the most aquatic novel I’ve ever read.
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Great books teach you how to read them and this is a perfect example. A singular book about intellectualism and its myriad struggles and pursuits. At first, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was reading, but somewhere pretty early on a switch was turned, a cave illuminated, and what DeWitt was doing became clear (as well as transcendent, hilarious, and moving).
A brilliant example of intellectual procrastination. The narrator can’t get anything done because of obsession and self-sabotage. Gass has a way with language that feels like a chef tasting his own sumptuous food, relishing in what he’s prepared.
Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
Another example of intellectual procrastination. This is a beloved trope of mine: a book about writing a book (of which said book is often never finished). Lesser Ruins, like The Tunnel and Out of Sheer Rage, are examples of the messy, often psychotic, act of writing (or attempting to write) a book. Dyer’s comic timing and clear debt to Thomas Bernhard are as magnificent as they are entertaining.
The late Chejfec was an incredibly beautiful writer and The Dark was my introduction. Much like Sebald’s novels, the reader is placed inside the narrator’s discursive mind, going on a strange, scenic walking tour replete with ghosts and memories. If it seems uncertain where you are, that was Chejfec’s intention, and it’s as disconcerting as it is rewarding (and Heather Cleary’s translation is magnificent).
The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
For my money, easily the best novel by Marquez, while also perhaps his strangest and most dense. If you want to get lost, I mean truly lost, this is the book. It’s weird, poignant, violent and bursting with incident. It’s also a brilliant examination of power, solitude, and the perils of corruption.
Though the protagonist in this novel is not as recently widowed as the protagonist of Lesser Ruins, the absence of the spouse can be felt throughout the story. The partner’s absence is an actual presence. This is a tender and somber novel, religious (in the holy sense); a book about life, love, death, art, memory, and God, you know, the big things.
Counternarratives by John Keene
I remember attempting this book a few times before it ‘clicked’ and even then I wasn’t completely certain what Keene was up to. I only knew I wanted to go along and find out. An incredible novel (or series of linked novellas) about history, slavery, colonialism, human nature; Keene’s language is incredible, moving from the past to the present and incorporating everything from newspapers to memoirs. A beautiful, important, and challenging book.
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Lispector’s 1964 novel is a perfect example of a straightforward premise that allows the author to go back in forth in time, in memory and incident. A sculptor kills a roach in her maid’s room, and this turns into a spiritual crisis. A stunning example of a novel that meanders and gets lost in the thoughts of its narrator. The use of space and time in this novel could be endlessly studied.
Like many of the writers on this list, there’s a host of different books by Woolf I could choose, but Orlando is a personal favorite, fusing gender, time, history into an amalgam of literary delight. It’s funny, strange and a joy to get lost inside.
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Unclassifiable, obscure, challenging, singular: there are as many ways to describe Borges’ fiction as there are adjectives. In Borges’ hands a library becomes a universe. Philosophic and playful and more influential than I probably even realize.
Seibo There Below by László Krasznahorkai
A Hungarian master’s interest in Asian culture, especially Japanese, gives the stories/novellas in this indescribable book a sense of joy and wonder absent in his earlier works. There is music, nature, pathos, a strange disorienting sense of being lost (along with many of his hapless protagonists). And if this sounds too serious and solemn, humor (albeit dark humor) abounds.
An incredible book that’s as much about unsung female scientists as it is about the universe and humanity’s thirst for knowledge. I love the writing as well as the meditations on science, feminism and the intersection between knowledge and art. A reader can easily lose themselves in these true stories that ring with profound meaning.
