Trainspotting and other weirdly written books

[Goldiefish]

I've been reading Trainspotting and I was wondering about how other people feel about weird to read books. In the case of this one the characters are in Scotland and their accents are written out phonetically. At first I hated it because I couldn't understand a lot but got used to it, though later on I didn't catch a major event (a baby dying) because I didn't realize bairn=baby. Anyone else read something like this or trainspotting itself

[Leewei]

A Clockwork Orange was written in a similar fashion. Instead of a modern accent, it used fictitious, post-modern jargon.

[JoshL]

Burgess' (Clockwork Orange) "A Dead Man in Deptford" is amazing, written in Elizabethan English. He does that sort of thing a lot, as does Welsh with the Scots dialect. James Joyce does the same with Irish, so you might want to check that out. I have a couple volumes of collected oral tradition folklore that preserve the dialect of the person telling the story, I'll get names for you later, they're fun reads. Particularly if you like folklore/fairytales.

There are lots of books written in a heavy jargon, particularly in sci-fi. Stephenson's "Anathem" has so much, even though the dialect is not presented, it seems like it sometimes because half the words are unfamiliar (it's pretty much all clear by the end)

[GloatingSwine]

A Clockwork Orange was written in a similar fashion. Instead of a modern accent, it used fictitious, post-modern jargon.

Nadsat is largely mangled Russian


Iain M Banks wrote a book like this called Feersum Endjinn. About a quarter of the book is written in first person occasionally phonetically Scottish text-speak.

[kraftcheese]

Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" has a lot of this; it's supposed to be a kind of narrated story of this guy in a future where most people only have access and knowledge of medieval level technology, so it can get really confusing when the sci-fi elements come in and the narrator does his best to explain what he's seeing.

There's one point where he describes a painting of a man in a golden-helmed suit of armour in a desert at night, and he's holding a weird standard that doesn't seem to be waving like a proper flag, and as he talks to a curator about it, it becomes clear that it's actually an ancient print of the moon landing photo.

Or when he sees a spacecraft taking off over the city, he doesn't really get what's going on; he's like "Uh, I guess it's a flying cathedral?"

[Swenner]

I've been reading Trainspotting and I was wondering about how other people feel about weird to read books. In the case of this one the characters are in Scotland and their accents are written out phonetically. At first I hated it because I couldn't understand a lot but got used to it, though later on I didn't catch a major event (a baby dying) because I didn't realize bairn=baby. Anyone else read something like this or trainspotting itself

Trainspotting is a masterpiece. I've read it a couple of times. Irvine Welsh at his best. Marabou Stork Nightmares is supposed to be up there as well.

[An Enemy Spy]

House of Leaves. I've never seen another book quite like it. I think anyone who tried to make an audio version of it would have to record it in another dimension where the laws of physics work differently.

[gomipile]

Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a bit of this, since some of the Lunar citizens and transportees speak an interesting creole patois with unique simplifications, shortcuts, and roundings of vocabulary and grammar.

The most popular book I've read which is weirdly written in other ways is the Illuminatus Trilogy. Some books are nonlinear and called difficult to follow because of quick scene changes within chapters or between paragraphs. The Illuminatus Trilogy sometimes changes scene within one sentence. And the way it's written gets much weirder beyond that. So, so much weirder.

[Khedrac]

Phonetically spelt books are actually quite common, and there's at least one SciFi series I gave up on because I found it too hard to understand (the careful balancing act authors have to manage).

If you want to try a very good, weirdly written fantasy novel I would suggest Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones.
Hexwood is written in plain English, but it is not written linearly. I'd probably class it as one of my favourite books.

[LeSwordfish]

I'm a big fan of Roddy Doyle, who does the same thing with Irish accents. I've got The Van nearby, and this is how he does dialogue.

Veronica had been in already to have a look at her. It was his turn now. One, two -
He grabbed the handle and went straight into the front room.
- Sorry, Darren, for bargin' in on yeh - Oh, hello.
- Hi.
She smiled. God she was lovely.
He held his hand out to her.
- Darren's da, he said. -Howyeh.
She blushed a bit, lovely.
-This is Miranda, Darren told Jimmy Sr.
-Sorry, said Jimmy Sr. -I didn't catch -
-Miranda, said Darren.
-Miranda, said Jimmy Sr. - Howyeh, Miranda.
-Fine, thank you, said Miranda.
-'Course yeh are, said Jimmy Sr.
-Were yeh lookin' for somethin' in particular? Darren asked him.

[Clertar]

Andrea Camilleri famously uses a big variety of Italian dialects and accents in his books. It's been translated with varied faithfulness and success.

[Fiery Diamond]

I'm a big fan of Roddy Doyle, who does the same thing with Irish accents. I've got The Van nearby, and this is how he does dialogue.

Ouch. That's downright painful to read. If it used standard punctuation rules I wouldn't even bat an eye at it; the actual words spoken are easy to understand and I'm used to that sort of phonetic transcription of dialogue. But stripping out the quotation marks and paragraph rules for dialogue makes it incredibly irritating. This is actually one of the reasons that although I love to read novels I have always despised literature classes. People expect me to treat authors like that with some sort of decency and respect instead of the disgust and scorn I genuinely feel. For example: The Sound and the Fury is a terrible book for which I have no respect. Stream of consciousness is BS in anything but poetry and real-life dialogue (and it's only acceptable in real-life dialogue in children).

[Serpentine]

House of Leaves. I've never seen another book quite like it. I think anyone who tried to make an audio version of it would have to record it in another dimension where the laws of physics work differently.

I've been slogging my way through this for a while now. I've never had to work so hard for a book in my life... but I am loving it.
I have a theory, that House of Leaves isn't a book; it's a work of art using a book as the medium. Same as how a painting isn't paint, it's made of paint; House of Leaves isn't a novel, it's made of a novel.

I think a movie of it might be possible, but it would have to be this weird, arthouse, fourth-wall-breaking... thing. It couldn't be a straight adaptation, but something that wants to do the same sort of thing the book does and translate that to what you can do with film. Maybe even more of an extension of the book... Or just the documentary it talks about?

[dps]

I've been reading Trainspotting and I was wondering about how other people feel about weird to read books. In the case of this one the characters are in Scotland and their accents are written out phonetically. At first I hated it because I couldn't understand a lot but got used to it, though later on I didn't catch a major event (a baby dying) because I didn't realize bairn=baby. Anyone else read something like this or trainspotting itself

Sometimes accents are written out phonetically in the 1632 series, especially the Scottish and Irish accents. A This is particularly noticeable in A Parcel of Rogues, which is set mostly in Scotland, and which has a lot of Scottish and Irish characters. It actually happens more with the Scots, since they're usually speaking English with a Scots accent, whereas the Irish are actually speaking Irish a good bit of the time (I think) and that's mostly just translated into more-or-less standard English.

[Feytalist]

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach has a pretty unusual structure. Not as overt as House of Leaves for example, but the format of the book is actually part of the theme of the book itself - considering its theme is partly about how we process information.

So the text will be interspersed with little Socratic dialogues, in canon or in palindromes, and the chapter headings will have recursive acrostics, and in many places the text will include examples of is being described in the text itself, and just little literary puzzles in all forms. It's a fascinating book; really well thought out and well-written in general. Fascinating subject matter, too.

[Otomodachi]

Whaaaaaaat? Noone for Finnegan's Wake?

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from serve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of circulation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

[Brother Oni]

My translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms is much the same in that it's basically a record of oral traditions of different stories mashed together into a single narrative, so you meet a new character, get a 2-3 page digression of their life history and important feats/events, then straight back into the main story. It's especially bad in the early chapters where you can meet 2/3 new characters per chapter.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has an excellent film example of this when Jen's boyfriend, Lo, sudden appears halfway through the film and we get an extended flashback.

Iain M Banks wrote a book like this called Feersum Endjinn. About a quarter of the book is written in first person occasionally phonetically Scottish text-speak.

Wait... 'Fearsome Engine'?

I am not a clever man.

[BWR]

It's especially bad in the early chapters where you can meet 2/3 new characters per chapter.
:

I can indeed imagine that meeting two-thirds of a person is quite bad.

(Sorry, couldn't help myself)

[Brother Oni]

I can indeed imagine that meeting two-thirds of a person is quite bad.

(Sorry, couldn't help myself)

Well there's one bit where, ashamed that he couldn't serve his honoured guests meat, a farmer kills, butchers then cooks and serves his wife (or some other family member) to Liu Bei.

If you wanted to get picky, it's probably less than 2/3rds of her that Liu Bei met, but the principle's there.

[tantric]

the brilliance of house of leaves is that by reading it, you become part of the story - which creeped me out for days.

my favorite postmodern book is Naked Lunch.

Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepatic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrents taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.

don't think this is a modern or western idea....Essays in Idleness zen lit.

[Clertar]

Nabokov has a funny central character in Pnin, an exiled Russian that speaks in a memorably mispronounced way.

"'Our friend,' answered Clements, 'employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mythopoeic. His slips of the tongue are oracular. He calls my wife John'."

'I search, John, for the viscous and sawdust,' he said tragically.
'I am afraid there is no soda,' she answered with her lucid Anglo-Saxon restraint. 'But there is plenty of whisky in the dining-room cabinet. However, I suggest we both have some nice hot tea instead.'