Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179817 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 816 pages

Synopsis
Finally re-released in paperback, this long out-of-print book is one of the most profound and best-selling science fiction novels of all time, critically renowned as one of the greatest works of 20th century American Literature. Bellona is a city at the dead centre of the United States. Something has happened there...The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Time moves differently for everyone. Two moons appear through the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young poet, lover and adventurer who is unable to remember his own name. Known only as the Kid, he is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona - the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast - the marginalised. Revolving around a mysterious and intricate layering of puzzles that will keep readers gripped until the end, Dhalgren is controversial, challenging and scandalous, brilliantly tackling serious questions of sex, gender, race, class, art and identity.

Customer Reviews

Jaw-dropping. Just awesome.
What this man can't do with words ain't worth doing. This monster of a novel is Delany's masterpiece. Compelling and enigmatic, it follows the life of The Kid as he enters and learns to live in the strange city of Bellona. For reasons unknown, the city is dying: most of its people have left. Of those who remain, some have fallen into anarchy and a frighteningly uncompromising freedom, whilst others cling to their old ways and habits. The Kid himself has been crazy in the past and is terrified of falling back into madness; but in Bellona it is impossible to tell madness from reality.

Relentlessly vivid (including desperately physical sex), the book sunk its claws into me for 900 pages and left me used up and gasping. No plot summary could even hint at the experience of reading this beast. Get it while it's in print.

Tough going, but worth it
I found Dhalgren much easier going the second tiome I tried to read it, I think because in the interim I had read four volumes of Proust, and the narrative style is not dissimilar - quite a lot of stream-of-consciousness reflection on the central character's state of mind, and Dhalgren even has a long sequence set at a party reminiscent of one of Proust's soirées, though with more swearing, and various other social gatherings are set-pieces of the narrative.

Also, of course, while Proust is very naturalistically creating a recognisable picture of urban and rural France, Delany's city of Bellona is as much as anything a state of mind, detached from the rest of the USA, where strange things happen in the sky and the central character knows that his own sense of time is as badly skewed as the local newspaper's chronology. Where Proust's narrator doesn't have a name, Delany's central character has two, though neither is complete. Delany's other characters are more archetypal than Proust's - the strait-laced Richards family, Newboy the poet, Kamp the astronaut, Calkins the editor, Denny and Lanya the central character's lovers. I was not always entirely comfortable with the racial or gender stereotypes I thought I detected.

Sex, of course, is a little more frequent and a lot more explicit in Delany's book; he is unembarrassed about polyamory and bisexuality where Proust is horrified by "inversion" - although Proust too has a lot of sex, the most explicit scene so far is one the narrator overhears rather than one he participates in. The other major difference is that Delany's central character is a writer, and spends a lot of time thinking about the relationship between his own art and life, compared to Proust who is always observing: watching other people's plays, listening to other people's music, reading other people's books.

Dhalgren is a bit self-indulgent in places - I think I understand why the last section of the book is presented as a working draft, but the point could have been made without demanding as much of the reader. But I was relieved that the story of the central character's poetry was told without actually blocking out the text with his poems, a practice I wish other authors (eg A.S. Byatt) would follow.

Anyhow, it was tough going in places, but worth it in the end.

a little extra info
I agree with Jason's review and would add that this is very much the product of its time, very soul-searching, "find yourself", self-indulgent 70s. It's nostagia for some of us!

The literary style is one of experimentation, breaking into themes and patterns of prose that repeat, excerpts, poetic musings. Diverse methods are used disjoint the text and the reading of it. This gives it an expressive freedom, matching the libertarian concerns of the work and the time and place in which it was written. It could be a bit off-putting to those that have specific preferences as to how SF should be written. Space Opera it ain't. That's why I liked it so much! Good writing is not a matter of fashion or a restrictive genre style.

I think it's beautiful, but don't bother if you like a tight, explicable, neat tale with fast pacing and a big bang at the end. You won't find that here.