Inspired by reading (and finally finishing after many false starts) If On A Winters Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino. I got to wondering about the things we take for granted as being part of a novel (e.g. a named protagonist) that might not be needed.
I also recently read Robinson Crusoe, which was apparently one of the earliest examples of realistic fiction with a protagonist with biographical details. Previously most novels were apparently set "once upon a time, far far away" with a protagonist with no set biographical details.
I wonder if there are any real boundaries in novel writing left to break – there are novels from animals perspectives, novels without a linear structure, etc. Are there any really unique novels that have come out recently?
by alyaaz
8 Comments
Pale Fire
Dahlgren by Samuel Delaney. It’s a trip.
House of Leaves
House of Leaves
Push, by Sapphire, Is written in the form of the journal of an illiterate girl who is being taught to read. It may not sound good, but it really is.
Austerlitz
There is No Year by Blake Butler. It starts off as a fairly normal, if somewhat surreal novel about an unnamed family moving into a suburban house, but quickly revolves into a fragmented nightmare. It was everything I wanted from House of Leaves with none of the tedium.
***Kiss of the Spider Woman* by Manuel Puig (1976)** is basically just dialogue and footnotes. Pages and pages of footnotes.
Edit: Though this is not a recent novel by any stretch of the imagination. But Google tells me there was a (new) film adaptation released last October.