Obscure literature 3

What is it about?

they are both great and will be added to the next thread
thank you this is the exact sort of thing i am looking for

EL GUSANO MÁXIMO DE LA VIDA MISMA

de Alberto Laiseca

Tusquets, Buenos Aires, 1999
Por Mariana Docampo

Transcribo el principio del primer párrafo de El gusano máximo de la vida misma:
“Ella era gordita, petisa, tetona y vivía en Nueva York. Además era terriblemente distraída. Noten esto porque es importante para la historia. Hacía un calor espantoso y húmedo. La petisa trotaba por las calles sin bombacha. Pero no por puta sino por acalorada. Olvidé decir que tenía un culo de ésos. Sus glúteos, sin el vínculo férreo, sin el dique del calzón, anadeaban que era un gusto. Ver un culo así, de lo más respingón y que no es de uno, causa desazón en el espíritu. Era como el culo movedizo del Tandil”.
Esto es Laiseca. Así comienza un libro todo escrito así, de principio a fin. Entonces, si leés este párrafo y te gusta, te gusta el resto, porque viene todo junto. Como arrastrado. Si no te gusta, mejor dejarlo ahí. Porque es así. Todo así. El personaje principal de esta novela es el gusano máximo de la vida misma, que es nada más y nada menos que un gusano semi-personificado que anda por las cloacas de Nueva York (o Buenos Aires “porque la novela está tan mal escrita que ya ni sé”), y que si nos ponemos a simbolizar, podría representar lo peor de nosotros mismos, o lo más sórdido y revulsivo de nuestra sociedad, o podría también no representar nada y ser un simple e inmundo gusano literario, escrito porque sí, por puro capricho y regocijo del autor. Pero lo interesante de todo esto para mí es que el gusano más que un personaje es la excusa de una voz narrativa. Y la trama de la novela más que una trama es el deambular disparatado de esta voz narrativa, que junto con el gusano va de aquí para allá, transitando no solo espacios físicos (cloacas, barrios bajos, barrios “conchetos”, etc.) sino espacios pura y exclusivamente literarios. La voz narrativa va y viene en el relato, sale y entra de la ficción, cuenta lo que le pasa al gusano, hace aclaraciones, se interrumpe, cambia de personaje, cuenta un pedazo de la infancia del propio Laiseca y se la achaca a la biografía del gusano, y después trata de ordenar un poco la historia, va para atrás, vuelve, y la novela se transforma de esta manera en un puro relato de cuyo proceso de creación el autor nos ha hecho cómplices a nosotros, sus lectores. Pareciera ser incluso que toda la novela trata de esto, de las posibilidades de la narración, del arte de narrar. Por mi parte leí el primer párrafo de este libro en una librería y me gustó. Lo compré. Leí el resto rápidamente, ávidamente, en el subte, en el colectivo, en el banco de una plaza de Once. Me reí mucho. Me encantó. Lo disfruté. Porque si hay algo que tiene Laiseca es que (¡por fin!) hace de la literatura pura literatura.

A good chunk of these books I've never seen mentioned en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_folk-epics

Bad Girl by Vargas Llosa

I haven't read it but my bro has, it's about this guy that may or may not be the prophet. Weird things start happening relatively quickly. At least I remember that being the terse response I got when I asked by bro the same question

These aren't that obscure to people that really know their literature but this is Veeky Forums: El Senor Presidente by Miguel Angel Asturias, one of those nobel winners that fell through the cracks of history; The Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, the great epic of Persia chronicling their zoroastrian time, the conquest of Alexander the great, and the eventual Islamic takeover; The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre, a French Decameron written and compiled by a French patron and noblewoman; A Sudden Liberating Thought by Kjell Askildsen, Norwegian minimal short stories, not rare but not a lot of this floating around in English so you'll need eBay.

Zone by Mathias Enard

I knocked this off a shelf at the library and picked it up because it was barely 100 pages and the cover was funny

It was A fascinating look into the mind of a guy terrified by population growth.
His extreme policy proposals are really fun to read.

Marabou stork nightmares by Irvine welsh.

Cielos, compadre, increíble manera en la que presentaste el libro. Tal que parecía el prólogo de una editorial. Me picó la curosidad, a buscarlo y guardo tu post. Lastima que los anons angloparlantes no puedan disfrutar tu recomendación. Sería bueno que lo tradujeras.

The Metaphysics of Meaning by Jerrold Katz

Things Kept Secret From the Foundation of the World by Unknown

The Rosicrucian Mysteries: An Elementary Exposition of Their Secret Teachings by Max Heindel

Semitic Magic Its Origins and Development by R. Campbell Thompson

A History of the Colonization of Africa, by Alien Races by Sir Harry H. Johnston

>sacred-texts.com

Fuck yeah.

Is there a reason for the mix of American and British spellings, e.g. "Honor" and "Honour?"

...

>obscure literature
>people list various well known esoteric texts

The first post contains ten mainstream-published books that I guarantee you've never even heard of, much less read.

ahi va loro

"The Maximum Worm of the Life Itself"
by Alberto Laiseca.

Tusquets, Buenos Aires, 1999.
By Mariana Docampo.

I am transcribing the beginning of the first paragraph of "The Maximum Worm of the Life Itself":

She was chubby, petite, busty and lived in New York. Besides, she was a terrible daydreamer. Notice that because it's important to the story. It was a dreadful and damp heat. The petite was jogging through the streets without panties. But not because a whore but heated. I forgot to mention she got one of those asses. Her buttocks, without the ferrous tie, without the underwear's dam, waddled their hips with a taste to the eye. Seeing an ass like that, pertly stood out, which is not from oneself, causes anxiety in the soul. It was like Tandil's shifting ass.

This is Laiseca. That's how a book written like this starts, all the way, from the beginning to the end. Then, if you read this paragraph and you like it, you'll love the rest; because it comes all together, like dragged. If you don't like it, leave it there; because it's all like this, completely. The main character is the maximum worm of the life itself, which is nothing more and nothing less than a semi-personified, prosopopoeian worm who walks through New York's sewers (or maybe through Buenos Aires ‘because the novel is so badly written that I'm not sure anymore'). If we start to symbolize, he may represent the worst of ourselves, or the most sordid and repulsive of our society, or it may represent nothing at all, being a mere and filthy literary worm, written just because, created for the author's pure whim and amusement. However, the most interesting thing is that the worm, more than a character is the excuse for a narrative voice. And the novel's plot, more than a plot is this narrative voice's crazy walking, which like the worm travels from here to there, transiting not only physical spaces (sewers, suburbs, kangdooms n' shiet, etc.) but purely and exclusively narrative spaces. The narrative voice comes and goes in the story, entering and leaving the fiction, tells what's going on with our worm, makes clarifications, is interrupted, switches the character, tells a slice of Laiseca's childhood and blames it to the worm's autobiography, and then he tries to arrenge the story a bit, goes back, returns, and the novel turns this way into a pure narration where the author has made accomplices to us, his readers. It seems like that is the point of the novel, the possibilities of the narrative itself, the craft of the narration. In my case, i read the first paragraph in a bookstore and i liked it. I bought it. I read the rest with alacrity and hungry, swiftly, in the subway, in the bus, in a seat of a Eleven's square. I keked a lot. I loved it. I enjoyed it. And that's because if Laiseca has something is that he (finally!) makes from the literature pure literature.

i've read that and really liked it
i read it because someone else on here recommended it, so there's at least two of us (if that person was you, thanks for the recommendation!)

ferdowsi and marguerite de navarre are way more well known than Chongyang Quanzhen Jihttp or Francesco Colonna

I don't believe it was me, but I'm happy that you enjoyed it all the same. I still have to read his other novels, which supposedly take place in the same world setting.

Know four of them by name, not that I'd go and pollute my mind reading them, at the same time pretty much all of them have wikipedia articles, often even goodreads pages, and are even digitalised! That's not a definition of obscurity, it's not on the plaster wall of well known pieces, but nonetheless, it's right by it. Obscure is one copy lying in the dust in library that you happen to be the first one to pick up since the 18th century. There are walls of these just lying around major libraries and forgotten monasteries.

Maybe not the "best" I've ever read, but Gli Indomabili (The Untamed) by Filippo Marinetti was certainly entertaining, as is quite a lot of futurist writing.

It's a strange mixture of sci-fi and political allegory by the driving force of the Italian futurist movement. It's like H. G. Wells meets Mad Max, filtered through the lens of an author who sees that which we would consider dystopian is actually something incredibly beautiful.

>but this is Veeky Forums