Six (more) offbeat books

Fiction that will turn your head inside out.

Mary Berman’s list of her favorite offbeat books of 2024 got me thinking of some of examples of my own. I love it when a book can surprise me, whether it’s with a unique narrative structure, an idiosyncratic approach to storytelling, or a completely novel premise.

Here are six weird, offbeat books that turned my head inside out when I first read them.

Christopher Priest’s Inverted World

Imagine a mobile city, slowly moving along a massive railway track across unforgiving terrain, trying to outrun an ever-encroaching force that threatens its existence. Workers must rip up the track behind and relay it ahead of the city to ensure perpetual motion. Distance, not time, is the main measure of things and perception is warped in bizarre ways.

Inverted World is a dystopian, sci-fi mystery that asks you to imagine a completely different, utterly disorienting way of looking at reality. That Priest is able to execute his twisted vision in a way that makes sense is astonishing, and the sensation of unease the book gives you makes up for the rather abrupt ending.

Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead

When Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead was published in 2006, it was set in the “near future,” where a society struggling with an ongoing climate catastrophe is gripped by a devastating global pandemic. Well, we know how that turned out. The novel alternates between the story of “The City,” a kind of metaphysical waiting room for the recent, remembered dead and the story of Laura Byrd, an Antarctic researcher who is cut off from the rest of the world and isn’t aware of the virus. I first discovered Brockmeier when the first chapter of this book was published as a short story in the New Yorker. It’s one of the best short stories I’ve ever read, so beautiful and imaginative and profound.

Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel

A great disturbing novel. Stories nested within stories like matryoshka dolls. Martial Canterel, a brilliant inventor and scientist invites a small group of friends to the titular estate to view his latest works. Roussel's narrative follows a formula or a rhythm that repeats throughout: a surrealist vignette, where the group witnesses the operation of Canterel's bizarre invention uncomprehendingly; then a science-fiction explanation, where Canterel reveals the impossible innovations that made such an invention possible; followed by a fable or parable (sometimes themselves containing yet another story within it) that explains the motivation behind the invention.

In the book's longest section, the group witnesses a series of reanimated corpses endlessly reliving a brief, crucial moment in their lives (entirely out of context) in an artificial tableau created by Canterel; the inventor then reveals how the corpses came to Locus Solus, how he contrived their reanimation, and the deeper meaning behind their revivified actions. The surrealist and sci-fi elements are presented dispassionately, with a technical remove; the fables and parables are, at times, horrifying, astonishing, and deeply moving. Everything is rich in detail; each word chosen carefully, each sentence purpose-built.

Locus Solus is an intricately designed machine (the cover imagery on this edition is aptly chosen; the stories all turn on one another), but like Canterel's inventions it's constructed not for any practical purpose or application but to show the immense power and depth of the imagination and the cleverness of its designer. It's no wonder people hated it in 1914. It’s not so much a story as an exercise in pure, untrammeled creation.

Noëlle Revaz’s With The Animals

Paul is a farmer who rules his isolated plot like a tyrant, pausing from his work only to batter his cowering wife, who he refers to only by a crude, objectifying slur. He pays his numerous children little regard, not even bothering to remember their names and only mentioning them when they swarm around him like gnats, howling in terror or cackling devilishly at some indignity he has visited on their mother. Any sentiment Paul might possess is reserved for his livestock.

Revaz (and translator W. Donald Wilson) have crafted a fascinating and unique argot for Paul, whose terse narration is a stew of malformed words, coarse slang, and awkward constructions. Though his actions are monstrous, Revaz doesn't cast Paul as purely evil, and this distinction is perhaps the book's most troubling element. "I do everything by nature," he says, "just like she made me."

Read my full review at The Boston Globe.

Andres Neuman’s Traveler of the Century

Set in the early nineteenth century, the story follows Hans, an itinerant philologist who stumbles into the German town of Wandernburg and finds it harder to leave than he expected. The streets of the little village have a peculiar, shifting quality that makes getting around difficult. It’s not the unusual layout that holds Hans back, however, but the people. The eponymous traveler falls in with two very different, but equally entertaining crowds.

The first is a group of tramps led by a shabby organ grinder, who meet in a cave to drink and wax philosophical on life’s challenges. The other is a klatch of aristocrats and intellectuals who frequent a salon hosted by the beautiful Sophie Gottlieb. Her impetuous nature and impressive intellect quickly capture Hans’s interest, and the two engage in a protracted flirtation couched in lively discussions of art, poetry, music, and politics, so as not to arouse the suspicions of her fiancé, the well-meaning yet dull Rudi Wilderhaus.

Traveler of the Century takes on big ideas, and does so with an acuity that raises it to the level of great literature. It reminds us that the most satisfying journeys are the ones in which we allow ourselves to forget the destination.

Read my full review at The Boston Globe.

Fien Veldman’s Hard Copy

The book follows an unnamed working class woman who lands a mundane but cushy office job. Anxious about a traumatic past and alienated from her white collar colleagues, she strikes up an obsessive, emotional relationship with her (possibly sentient) desktop printer. And just when you think you’ve got your head around the narrator’s psychological state, Veldman shifts the book’s perspective about three-fourths of the way through and forces you to consider whether she might not be wrong about her officemate.

Full of Kafkaesque touches and plenty of wry humor, the book satirizes the enervating contradictions of contemporary work, and though it doesn’t directly touch on the current in-office/remote work debate, it does deftly illustrate the corporate cold war between who chafe against the petty absurdities of the office and those who seem to relish them.