In Pursuit of the Imagination
Nine Elusive Books
When I began to read in deadly earnest, it was always with the unknown in mind: Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Last Unicorn, James and the Giant Peach. Always, I see with the benefit of hindsight, I loved most those authors who gave generously of their imagination, who let fly with the most outrageous, absurd, sublime characters and situations; they literally had devoured the world and remade it in their image.
Time has not changed this quality in me: I demand BIG imaginations from the novelists I read and I demand that quality of the bittersweet which permeates our world like the beautiful red blossoms that so tormented me with allergies when I was a child. And if I now also demand thematic resonance, perfect attention to detail, intellectual stimulation, and emotional depth, well, these are merely the accoutrements that life acquires in our gliding journey across its luminous, lacerated, smirking face.
What genre of books do I read? A genre without a king, without a country, without maps or roads, so that I am at once wandering through all of the strange lands of fiction and yet belong to none of them. And yet, if forced to apply a name, a label, what could better suit what I read than “literature of the fantastic?” All of the books I love change the way we view the world, and all have an element of the fantastical, the transcendent, the unknown.
Italo Calvino, that greatest of book lovers, once wrote a wonderful tome entitled If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, in which a reader buys a book only to find the first chapter doesn’t match the rest of the text—that the rest of the book he wanted to read hasn’t been printed inside the book he has bought. Thus begins a quixotic quest to find the rest of that original book, spanning a hilarious and strange continuum in which books hide and change before our eyes.
The books I recommend below are elusive books—out of print, only available overseas, or published in the mainstream and thus often lost to readers of the fantastic. Forgotten, under-appreciated, or only appreciated by a select group.
I give no clues on where to find these books—you will have to find them for yourself, after diligent search, until that moment, in the back room of a used bookstore on some neglected alley in Trafalgar Square or the French Quarter or somewhere more prosaic, when you experience that tell-tale double-thrill. First it is the thrill of discovery, followed quickly by a second, more permanent sensation: the knowledge that the real discovery still awaits you, between the covers of the book you hold in your hands.
The New York Trilogy (1985) by Paul Auster
Composed of three short novels—The City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—The New York Trilogy marked the debut of one of the United States’ most talented novelists, Paul Auster. Disguised as detective stories, the three novels actually turn the process of detection inward, until the detective investigates himself. Auster’s approach is pleasurably post-modern, for the novels all preserve the page-turning narrative thrust of the detective novel while dealing with the most introspective of subjects: the loss of self, the search for self, the alienation from self. The reader is hooked from page one of the first novel, which begins:
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone [Quinn] was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.
