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Does anyone know if any /lit/ that includes "incomprehensible" themes or strange premises? Stuff like The Library of Babel from Borges (if you like that read his stuff in Labyrinths). I also really liked his one about literature influencing events in the real world. I heard a book called Piranesi has a Babel-like premise. Just general experimental literature thread I guess

>>6126 I read a lot of experimental literature/speculative fiction of various types. Strange premises and incomprehensible themes, lets see. The Museum of Eterna's Novel by Macedonio Fernandez is a book that inspired Borges. It's kinda hard to explain but basically its like the story to the backdrop of a novel with the author working as a director with archetypal representations of what he wants his characters to be. The Gentleman, The Princess etc, It's a pretty difficult book but its quite fun at times. The Passion According to G.H. is about a woman having an existential crisis in her apartment. It takes place almost entirely in her head, occasionally she changes rooms. It has one of my favorite quotes in it. >What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.” Marcel Schwob's work Imaginary Lives inspired Borges fictional histories but his best work is called "The Book of Monelle". The so-called bible of the French Symbolist movement, It is mostly made up of stories he wrote for his love as she was dying in his arms of some disease. Most of them are inspired by famous myths but you can feel what he did when writing them very poigantly. Beautiful book. My Tired Father by Gellu Naum It's an autobiography of the Romanian Surrealist made by cutting fragments of sentences out of American fashion magazines. It seems like nonsense at first but the more you read the more you start to the see the outline of his life

>>6126 If you're into Borges and you're looking for strange premises, Alberto Laiseca is another great author to read. Shame none of his writings were translated into English. Unlike Borges, his books are usually on the long side, and have a way of making you delve into a strange and fascinating world that's completely unique to it. There's tons of humour and bizarre premises mixed in with political commentary and he explores many mystical tangents. He's a must-read if you know Spanish.

>>6129 That .epub is his most well-known novel, Las Sorias. Here's my favourite, El jardín de las máquinas parlantes

Julio Cortázar is compared to Borges by some, others say those people are missing something somewhere. Read the story Axolotl and decide for yourself. It's haunting to say the least. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany contains sections (notably the first page) that seem like random gibberish the first time but actually make sense the second time you read them, or... maybe not readable sense but almost like html referring to other portions of the novel. Which is impressive given that it was published in 1975. It's long and I've read it three times, and I'll never be finished reading it. Dhalgren was compared to Nabokov's Pale Fire which I'd also recommend though the author was more forward in instructing the reader as to how to navigate it.

>>6135

I haven't yet read [pic related] but it sounds like what you're looking for. I also see Greg Egan has other books with a mathematical flavor, again, I haven't read any yet. Also Flatland and A.K. Dewdney's The Planiverse. Not sure if they your parameters though. Since we're into latin american authors, well, Augusto Monterroso isn't exactly experimental, but if you're interested in pushing the limits of short narrative he's a good source.

>>6129 Looks like im learning spanish

>>6139 Dichronauts is really weird, it will be amazingly confusing if you've never heard of hyperbolic geometry. Good book though. And yeah Greg Egan writes a lot of math into his books. Flatland is great as well, less confusing maybe but certainly very far ahead of its time. Also has some great quotes: "That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy."

>>6134 Wow, Axolotl was amazing. Will definitely read more of his. >>6139 Dichronauts seems interesting, but I'm having a harder time wrapping my head around it than Flatland. Flatland was amazing, and I have a copy of the Planiverse but it seems to daunting to start.

>>6126 Foucault Pendulum by Eco Between Blue and Blue by Queneau If on a winter night, a traveller by Calvino

>>6166 >Foucault Pendulum by Eco It's soykaf. Read The Name of The Rose instead.

I've been reading a whole bunch of Jose Saramago recently and, while I understand how his writing style can be repulsive to some, I find that the lack of quotations and hard breaks really lends itself to the feverish and half-mad settings on which he focuses by describing them from the point of view of a third person narrator's stream of consciousness, There is something at once vivid and distant about describing a Potter's ride into The City to deliver his wares as passing through "The Green Belt", "The Industrial Sector", "The Slums" as though they were concentric rings around a massive and gradually growing nameless City and it's monolithic core The Center which appears to us first as a horizon spanning wall and seemingly swallows city blocks in its gradual expansion like a bureaucratic black hole, and fitting to that analogy we might not even know that anyone ever entered or left The Center if not for the Potter's son-in-law who works there as a guard or perhaps we would deduce that comings and goings would be inevitable based on the ongoing demand for the Potter's wares, dwindling though that demand may be with the advent of cheap and durable plastics. So anyways, I would recommend both The Cave and The Double by Jose Saramago.

Paul Auster wrote some incredible novels about blurring the line between literature, would highly recommend them. Very readable mystery novels that are fairly short. Not exactly fun reads, but Nick Land's text are absolutely on similar themes of incomprehnsibility. CCRU is a better read but Fanged Noumena is trippier.

>>7037 forgot I could post epubs here. Also including Murakami's 1Q84. It's long but absolutely incredible, like a surrealist Infinite Jest

>>6126 Chesterton. Borges was super into him too. You can also check out John Donne. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for but perhaps you'll enjoy them.