among them:
-it's hard to understand because it's written in glaswegian dialect, i.e., you have to really be paying attention and working to get what's going on
-it's told from the first person point of view of a drunk who's wandering around the city
-the descriptive quality is both luminous and enigmatic
-because he's mostly drunk his attention wanders, thus his narrative wanders and jumps
tried to read hebdemeros by giorgio de chirico once. thought it might be a good spatial/surreal kind of thing. it still might be! but i found it unreadable.
Thanks for posting ... this is actually a research interest of mine. I'll just begin a short list ...
1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow -- bizarre, freaky, drugged-out descriptions of Berlin in ruins during the waning days of World War II.
2. Edward Carey, Alva & Irva -- a novel about a set of twins who build a miniature city in their own home.
3. J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes -- I loved the descriptions of a city melting under the anvil of the Mediterrenean Sun.
4. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita -- read this novel while looking at a map of Moscow. Or even better, while consulting this website. You can get a feeling of what it's like to buy an apartment in the then-brand-new Soviet Union ... from a talking cat.
5. Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit -- a book that acts a "guide" through any number of European and Latin American capitals. The book even describes itself as a mixture between Bela Lugosi and the Marx Brothers.
6. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We -- Life in a hyper-modernized, technologically driven Soviet city of the future. I love the descriptions of gleaming buildings and ultra-streamlined rockets named after mathematical equations.
7. Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir -- A collection of detective novels. You can literally smell and taste Berlin's changes from the beginning of World War II to the beginning of the Allied occupation.
8. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet -- Amazing descriptions of Alexandria, Egypt in the days before the second World War.
9. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, The Windup Bird Chronicle, and others -- In reading these, you can get a great sense of living in the hyperdensified Japan of the latter half of the 20th century.
10. Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country -- in reading this novel, one can get a really good feeling for the desolate, snow-covered moonscapes of the northernmost reaches of Hokkaido.
A trilogy that consists three detective stories. A nice and clever book that uses a great way of narrative description of the events and the observation through the city and the behaviours of the individuals.
Another Haruki Murikami book that's spatially interresting is Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It's a novel that's about space in a very fundamental way.
I think the more appropriate pynchon would be the crying of lot 49
memory and the city, snow, and my name is red by orhan pamuk. he was an architecture student before dropping out to write, many of his books feel very spatial.
Emile Zola - L'Assommoir and Nana
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
Piri Thomas - Down These Mean Streets
any number of novels vaguely interested in/descriptive of their settings...a bit of a moronic quest (per Eco: 'Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets too, and therefore cats bark.") Beyond the formal restraint of a novel, how about Proust's Combray, Woolf's London, Buffy's SunnyDale (which has much to do with Lynch's and Von Trier's reversals of utopias), sex and the city's city...what is "best urban feeling" anyways?Zola's Paris (and therefor "urban feeling") and Proust's might as well be on different continents. There are also works like Ionesco's "“Amedee, or How To Get Rid of It,†that make a bedroom into not just a city..but a whole world..and others that make the whole world into a redundant selfsimilair fragment (Beckett)...etc etc etc. but seriously, for descriptions (minus this random search for a link to 'space') no one beats Proust...no one can, not possible, no, no no. he embraced the artificial brilliance of description, almos with a whimsical dismissal of its real thing.
No, not a moronic quest, but only a beginning, that's all. Proust ... yes, everyone agrees. But I am willing to wager on Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels as well as Pylon (which takes place in a city named New Valois), as well as Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, and Borges' "Death and The Compass" (the inscription of a literal and figural tetragrammaton across the urban fabric of a fictional city) or "The Library of Babel" (a detailed description of a single building).
I am not sure where to go with this beyond novels that are "vaguely interested in/descriptive of their settings", and I think it is very hard to find a work of fiction that is "architecturally themed". So the trick is to find a work of prose fiction that acts as spatial and urban praxis, no? And that, of course, means going beyond description. Good point, cellardoor.
And good call on Amedee ... there is something magnificently strange about that work ... a dead child growing in size .... it's feet exploding through the apartment ... so good. I think of Figures, Doors, Passages when I think of Amedee.
no one's mentioned Garcia-Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
A century in a the town of Macondo. Even deals with issues like urbanization, gentrification, life and death of the city... I haven't read it in years and it'd be interesting to re-read w/ an architectural focus...
i'd think Marquez's deterioration of place is really synonymous with that of a family in the play of materials, not abstract vectors. Space, in and for itself, does not come across as a real concern but as a consequential vessel (and it is the ultimate apotheosis of the book that space theatrically impoldes with the last member of the family). it is a very materialistic literary world, sometimes comically so in the tradition of rabelais. Even that most abstract slicing in word-object resemblance in the amnesia disease chapter of the book, the de-communicative de-vice seems to travel in air. there is a tinge of borges in it, but where borges might be have revelled in the abstraction crafted and wrought out a puzzle/paradox from it, spatial or otherwise, marquez's eye is on the materials/characters he imbued his novel with. Which brings me unaware to ponder this: within the novelistic (and not the novel...this is the same distance between the poetic and the poem), isn't it the least novelistic to be very aware of the intelligence (ie a thematic) of the space crafted within the novel and the most novelistic when that awareness is so covert and wellknit with the other features that one cannot derive that intelligence? In Borges, who can only really write short stories, modernist fables, well, one can.....but in Auster, in Marquez, in Ozick, in Rushdie (to cite contemporary writers) one can't. Calvino, I've only read his Invisible Cities and something else so cannot really judge, but I got the slight impression that in the same way his 'cittas' were schizophrenically cleave cut (up/down, light/dark, visible/invisible..) so was his way of thinking and writing. How much does he describe and is it for the purpose of creating an explicit 'architectural' structure of paradoxes and ideas and/or is it to tell a story, the implicit ? He seems to occupy 2 planes almost too consciously.
and Kundera in his later novels is like Diet Pepsi. Taste,fizzy no calories...just evenescence and a light afternoon nap headache. Or in contrary, like pure water, tasteless, no interesting bodies lurking around.
The Novels which has close links with space.
Which novels do you think give the best urban feeling and the best space descriptions while you are reading them?
Italo Calvino Invisible Cities
i also the descriptions of LA in books by James Elroy and Michael Connelly.
for several reasons.
among them:
-it's hard to understand because it's written in glaswegian dialect, i.e., you have to really be paying attention and working to get what's going on
-it's told from the first person point of view of a drunk who's wandering around the city
-the descriptive quality is both luminous and enigmatic
-because he's mostly drunk his attention wanders, thus his narrative wanders and jumps
thanks for replies.
I also love Invisible cities, I read it for years again and again.
So others?
I'd recommend Aragon's Paris Peasant and Anne Petrie's The Street.
tried to read hebdemeros by giorgio de chirico once. thought it might be a good spatial/surreal kind of thing. it still might be! but i found it unreadable.
Thanks for posting ... this is actually a research interest of mine. I'll just begin a short list ...
1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow -- bizarre, freaky, drugged-out descriptions of Berlin in ruins during the waning days of World War II.
2. Edward Carey, Alva & Irva -- a novel about a set of twins who build a miniature city in their own home.
3. J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes -- I loved the descriptions of a city melting under the anvil of the Mediterrenean Sun.
4. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita -- read this novel while looking at a map of Moscow. Or even better, while consulting this website. You can get a feeling of what it's like to buy an apartment in the then-brand-new Soviet Union ... from a talking cat.
5. Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit -- a book that acts a "guide" through any number of European and Latin American capitals. The book even describes itself as a mixture between Bela Lugosi and the Marx Brothers.
6. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We -- Life in a hyper-modernized, technologically driven Soviet city of the future. I love the descriptions of gleaming buildings and ultra-streamlined rockets named after mathematical equations.
7. Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir -- A collection of detective novels. You can literally smell and taste Berlin's changes from the beginning of World War II to the beginning of the Allied occupation.
8. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet -- Amazing descriptions of Alexandria, Egypt in the days before the second World War.
9. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, The Windup Bird Chronicle, and others -- In reading these, you can get a great sense of living in the hyperdensified Japan of the latter half of the 20th century.
10. Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country -- in reading this novel, one can get a really good feeling for the desolate, snow-covered moonscapes of the northernmost reaches of Hokkaido.
Cosmicomics, also by I.Calvino.
Pinocchio in Venice by Robert Coover
electronic excerpt?
I remembered "Paul Auster-The New York Trilogy"
A trilogy that consists three detective stories. A nice and clever book that uses a great way of narrative description of the events and the observation through the city and the behaviours of the individuals.
ooh..some good choices above.
How about also
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski (maybe not urban, but spatial)
Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo (classis description of paris)
Another Haruki Murikami book that's spatially interresting is Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It's a novel that's about space in a very fundamental way.
I think the more appropriate pynchon would be the crying of lot 49
memory and the city, snow, and my name is red by orhan pamuk. he was an architecture student before dropping out to write, many of his books feel very spatial.
the atlas by william vollman
immortality by milan kundera
surprised no one said borges yet.
Emile Zola - L'Assommoir and Nana
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
Piri Thomas - Down These Mean Streets
any number of novels vaguely interested in/descriptive of their settings...a bit of a moronic quest (per Eco: 'Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets too, and therefore cats bark.") Beyond the formal restraint of a novel, how about Proust's Combray, Woolf's London, Buffy's SunnyDale (which has much to do with Lynch's and Von Trier's reversals of utopias), sex and the city's city...what is "best urban feeling" anyways?Zola's Paris (and therefor "urban feeling") and Proust's might as well be on different continents. There are also works like Ionesco's "“Amedee, or How To Get Rid of It,†that make a bedroom into not just a city..but a whole world..and others that make the whole world into a redundant selfsimilair fragment (Beckett)...etc etc etc. but seriously, for descriptions (minus this random search for a link to 'space') no one beats Proust...no one can, not possible, no, no no. he embraced the artificial brilliance of description, almos with a whimsical dismissal of its real thing.
I was taking it more as "spatially/architecturally themed and/or relevant" rather than simply descriptive.
proust, yes...but no mention of joyce/dublin?
No, not a moronic quest, but only a beginning, that's all. Proust ... yes, everyone agrees. But I am willing to wager on Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels as well as Pylon (which takes place in a city named New Valois), as well as Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, and Borges' "Death and The Compass" (the inscription of a literal and figural tetragrammaton across the urban fabric of a fictional city) or "The Library of Babel" (a detailed description of a single building).
I am not sure where to go with this beyond novels that are "vaguely interested in/descriptive of their settings", and I think it is very hard to find a work of fiction that is "architecturally themed". So the trick is to find a work of prose fiction that acts as spatial and urban praxis, no? And that, of course, means going beyond description. Good point, cellardoor.
And good call on Amedee ... there is something magnificently strange about that work ... a dead child growing in size .... it's feet exploding through the apartment ... so good. I think of Figures, Doors, Passages when I think of Amedee.
Georges Perec - Life: A User's Manual
no one's mentioned Garcia-Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
A century in a the town of Macondo. Even deals with issues like urbanization, gentrification, life and death of the city... I haven't read it in years and it'd be interesting to re-read w/ an architectural focus...
i'd think Marquez's deterioration of place is really synonymous with that of a family in the play of materials, not abstract vectors. Space, in and for itself, does not come across as a real concern but as a consequential vessel (and it is the ultimate apotheosis of the book that space theatrically impoldes with the last member of the family). it is a very materialistic literary world, sometimes comically so in the tradition of rabelais. Even that most abstract slicing in word-object resemblance in the amnesia disease chapter of the book, the de-communicative de-vice seems to travel in air. there is a tinge of borges in it, but where borges might be have revelled in the abstraction crafted and wrought out a puzzle/paradox from it, spatial or otherwise, marquez's eye is on the materials/characters he imbued his novel with. Which brings me unaware to ponder this: within the novelistic (and not the novel...this is the same distance between the poetic and the poem), isn't it the least novelistic to be very aware of the intelligence (ie a thematic) of the space crafted within the novel and the most novelistic when that awareness is so covert and wellknit with the other features that one cannot derive that intelligence? In Borges, who can only really write short stories, modernist fables, well, one can.....but in Auster, in Marquez, in Ozick, in Rushdie (to cite contemporary writers) one can't. Calvino, I've only read his Invisible Cities and something else so cannot really judge, but I got the slight impression that in the same way his 'cittas' were schizophrenically cleave cut (up/down, light/dark, visible/invisible..) so was his way of thinking and writing. How much does he describe and is it for the purpose of creating an explicit 'architectural' structure of paradoxes and ideas and/or is it to tell a story, the implicit ? He seems to occupy 2 planes almost too consciously.
or was it the water? I forgot :o)
and Kundera in his later novels is like Diet Pepsi. Taste,fizzy no calories...just evenescence and a light afternoon nap headache. Or in contrary, like pure water, tasteless, no interesting bodies lurking around.
Topology Of A Phantom City - Robbe-Grillet
ooh, robbe-grillet...maybe not much of a spatial quality to it, but his novel 'repetition' has some wacky ways of dealing with/messing with time.
George Saunders, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (a novella)
(it's so silly. definitely not his best.
... maybe his worst?)
latin american and formerly eastern european writers what is this 1985?
how bout the tesseract house, by robert heinlein.
oh i know it ain't cerebral AT ALL, but there is an architect involved, and space is folding all over the place, in several dimensions.
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