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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.''
There is a book snob living inside of me and that guy has theories about finding out who's a real reader and who's a weekend warrior. For example, if you've read long enoug and voraciously enough, your favourite book cannot be obvious. It can't be THE GREAT GATSBY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE or anything that was a mandatory reading in high school. Thorough readers have discovered some of the best kept secrets of literature. One of these secrets is Samuel R. Delany. He was a very popular author in a different world back when the internet didn't exist, but he's seen today as a science-fiction icon, but he's way more than this. DHALGREN is arguably his most popular book, which allegedly sold over a million copy in the seventies. Did you even know about that novel? Me neither, not until a couple years ago. It's easy to understand why it sold so well. It's great dystopian fiction.
DHALGREN is, first and foremost, about Bellona, a city in the dead center of the United States. Something happened in Bellona, some kind of natural disaster. The streets are empty, the population has fled, the buildings are abandoned and time seems out of joint. There are strange occurrences of portals randomly opening in the sky and a second sun also appears at times. Bellona has become much more than a wasteland to the lost souls of America. It has become a place of renewal where people get a second chance and understanding who they really are. The Kid has stumbled into Bellona because he had forgotten who he was altogether. Turns out that The Kid : A poet, a lover, a warrior and one heck of a party animal. Not only Bellona will reveal him to himself, but it will become his future.
Here is THE ONE THING you need to know before giving DHALGREN a shot: the first ten pages don't make much sense. You have to bear with it. You're allowed to skim it, but you're not allowed to take a decision on DHALGREN before like, page 24 (where I think the first chapter ends). Josie gave it a go before me and threw the book against the wall on page 6. It's an understandable reaction, believe me, but it lasts for only ten pages. The point of this confusing start is that it's a texte that will later be gradually deciphered by The Kid. Or at least, he'll try. Metatextuality is a thing in DHALGREN. There are texts within the texts (way more than one) and they tie-in together and feed off one another as you keep reading. It's not everybody's cup of tea. It's kind of an exhausting way to read fiction, to tell you the truth, but Samuel Delany never wallows in hollow literary gimmicks. There is always a rewarding aspect to his metatextual shenanigans.
“There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.”
The first two hundred pages of DHALGREN made me drop to one knee. The description of the withering Bellona, the muted sense of alienation, the sheer mystery aspect of what's going on in the city hit me hard. I know it sounds stupid, but it reminded me of LOST, one of my favourite supernatural narratives. But cyberpunk icon William Gibson said it in the foreword: DHALGREN is not an enigma that's meant to be solved. The further Samuel Delany goes into his novel, the further he moves from traditional dystopian storytelling and symbolism. DHALGREN becomes gradually more about art and the process of writing as The Kid scores a publishing deal and becomes somewhat of a local celebrity. There is this whole mythical aspect of the novel that kicks into another gear with The Kid as a stand-in for Greek God of partying Dyonisos and DHALGREN takes a turn into abstraction. I don't do very well with that stuff. How traditional and narrow-minded of me, I gradually lost interest between page 200 and 650. The last part is actually very cool and contains Kid's memories from before Bellona, which makes the novel come full circle and reconciled me with it a little. There is no straight resolution, but that I could deal with. I'm not THAT narrow-minded.
Is DHALGREN an impenetrable novel? Not really. It's an ambitious and thoroughly crafted novel, but it remains fairly readable for its 800 pages. It's not an easy read, but it's not deliberately obtuse either. You should read it when traveling and having new experiences. It's that kind of book that should accompany you throug something meaningful, that will add a layer of signification to your experiences. DHALGREN requires commitment, but it has a lot to offer also. I've read it through a painfully meaningless 10 days stretch where I worked, wrote, trained and read and maybe some of its transformative magic was lost on me. But don't let my reserves about the more abstract half of this novel stop you. DHALGREN is a book that possesses this strange magnetic power that special books have. It's multifaceted and complex and there is probably something for every reader that decides to commit to it