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A review by grayjay
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
5.0
A young man with a faulty memory arrives in the city of Bellona. He rembers growing up on a reservation and he remembers being treated for depression, but he doesn't know his name and he has some confusion about his past.
Bellona is a city that's gone through some kind of disaster—maybe bombing, race riots, metadimensional space-time rift??—no radio or television comes in or out of the city, it is covered in thick smoke, there are still frequent fires, the population has gone from two million to about two thousand, and the rest of the country seems to have forgotten about it.
There are discussions about sex, gender, race, society, politics, religion, art, mental health, memory, consciousness, and more.
The novel is fairly episodic, "the Kid" meeting various characters, developing friendships, having adventures, and exploring the city. In the end, the novel circles round and become the beginning again, making you question all of the answers you think you've found.
There is quite a lot of sex in the book. Kid has many partners—men, women, teenagers, sometimes more than one at a time. A lot of the novel is about his relationships, how he navigates them, how he treats people. There is definitely some problematic emotional and sexual violence. There is a very graphic (consentual) gangbang scene. Also the sex with teenagers thing bothered me.
This and several other things make this a challenging book—it's a door stopper at 800 pages, and while main register is a fairly straightforward third person omniscient, it frequently dips and swerves into a surreal, modernist stream-of-conscience. There were sections I had to re-read to understand.
I think I landed on loving it, even for it's challenges. It's not often that I find a book so challenging also to be a page turner.
Bellona is a city that's gone through some kind of disaster—maybe bombing, race riots, metadimensional space-time rift??—no radio or television comes in or out of the city, it is covered in thick smoke, there are still frequent fires, the population has gone from two million to about two thousand, and the rest of the country seems to have forgotten about it.
There are discussions about sex, gender, race, society, politics, religion, art, mental health, memory, consciousness, and more.
The novel is fairly episodic, "the Kid" meeting various characters, developing friendships, having adventures, and exploring the city. In the end, the novel circles round and become the beginning again, making you question all of the answers you think you've found.
There is quite a lot of sex in the book. Kid has many partners—men, women, teenagers, sometimes more than one at a time. A lot of the novel is about his relationships, how he navigates them, how he treats people. There is definitely some problematic emotional and sexual violence. There is a very graphic (consentual) gangbang scene. Also the sex with teenagers thing bothered me.
This and several other things make this a challenging book—it's a door stopper at 800 pages, and while main register is a fairly straightforward third person omniscient, it frequently dips and swerves into a surreal, modernist stream-of-conscience. There were sections I had to re-read to understand.
I think I landed on loving it, even for it's challenges. It's not often that I find a book so challenging also to be a page turner.