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Reviews 25: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
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- Опубліковано 27 лют 2023
- In this video I talk about Russell Hoban's 1980 sci-fi novel, Riddley Walker.
This Guardian article offers a good summary of the pleasures of this novel: www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
Other works mentioned during the course of this video:
Zora Neale Hurston, And Their Eyes Were Watching God
Literary terms used and the critics who coined them:
the time of the narration (Gerard Genette)
skaz (Boris Eikhenbaum
eye dialect (George Philip Krapp)
delayed decoding (Ian Watt)
Note: There's the obvious comparison between the invented language of Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. These two books are so frequently mentioned together that I felt it was not worth going over the same ground. In fact, in its sense of immediacy, I would suggest that Knut Hamsun's Hunger is closer in spirit to Hoban's novel.
#booktube #bookreview #sciencefiction
Thank you very much for making this (excellent) review! Riddley Walker belongs to these books that can scare people and discourage them to open and read them. How wrong this would be! It is a marvel of a book. A unique and complete reading experience. Not only the story itself is great, but making up a language, with so many nuances, puns, meanings, a peculiar spelling for 200+ pages, and still be a readable novel, this is genius. Of course it can be irritating for English readers to see the words spelt/spelled in a funky way.
Riddley Walker is a true literary experience to be lived at least once. Read this book, and read it a loud too to hear this special language, have fun deciphering the words and understanding what they mean according to the characters. What amazed me is the ability of Russell Hoban to have the readers fully engaged in the process of reading. It's demanding for sure, but if you let yourself being grasped by the immediacy of the events, by the voice of the young Riddley, then you're going through one stupendous book.
I hope your review will encourage people to read Riddley Walker. Once again I'm grateful to you Jason for mentioning this genuine piece of literature because I've spent a memorable reading time page after page.
So glad you enjoyed this great book! It's a celebration of language, full of magic and mystery, and while I wish there were more books that provided such a rich reading experience, I can also see why examples are few and far between. It takes a significant amount of both talent and courage (on the part of writer and publishers) to see a project like this through to the finish. Maybe a Riddley-AI can write a sequel in a year or two.
An awesome review of my favorite book. Thank you. ❤
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it. Absolutely one of my favorites too.
One of my all time favourite novels and great to see it on book tube! It was a key influence for David Mitchell in writing the central chapter of Cloud Atlas too.
Thanks! A truly great book. Never read any David Mitchell since putting down his Number 9 Dream, but I understand he's also a pretty adventurous writer.
Excellent introduction to Riddley Walker, but more especially interesting for your comparisons with Zora Neale Hurston's novel and the illuminating discourse on literary terms with which I was hitherto unfamiliar : eye dialect, and skaz. I have already ordered copies of both novels and now, it seems, must seek out works by Boris Eikhenbaum and George Philip Krapp. At this rate watching your channel is either going to bankrupt me or have my book collection gradually shove me out of the house (whichever comes first)!
Yes, a whiff of the classroom about some of this review, but it's such an interesting read and I didn't want to spoil what is an excellent story. Apologies for hitting you in your pocket book.
Hoban's "Fremder" is also definitely SF - even more so - there are spaceships! Very good, very different than RW.
Thanks, I'd not heard of that one, I will check it out. I have Amaryllis Night and Day, but I found that very disappointing; its portrayal of women has aged very badly - there's something Murakami-like about that book.
Hmm, well forewarning there are two very strong female characters, a mother and an interrogator, lol. The pov character is male. Overall it has a cyber-punky dystopia, screaming voices in the cracks of reality feel.
@@TheChannelofaDisappointedMan
Sounds good! I just finished yet another dystopia, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a low bar for Hoban to clear.
I remember enjoying "Oryx and Crake" enough even though I harbour a prejudice against "literary-speculative-fiction" people such as Atwood, Amis etc.
Hoban is immune to this because he's also a children's author, lol, a very humble seeming man.
I havn't gone back for the sequels for Oryx and Crake...@@TheChannelofaDisappointedMan
I share your prejudice re Atwood, Amis, etc. (and I'd add Ishiguro to the list of offenders), and I dislike literary fiction as a whole; I've thousands of books, but nothing by anyone whose work could be placed in that category (bar some Ishiguro novels which my PhD supervisor insists I read just so I can say I've read them, and which I still haven't read.)
Similarly, I only read Oryx and Crake because it was for a class and, even as I was reading it, I was adamant there was no way I'd be reading the other two parts. It was certainly readable, but I found the hybrid animals, product names, corporations, etc. that she came up with lame, particularly 'wolvog'.
Yes, Hoban's trajectory is far more interesting, focused as it is on producing works of the imagination than any cultivating of a literary persona as in the case of Amis and the rest.
While your review was great, I really struggled with the book. Glad I read it, but would I read it again? Probably not. It creates a unique atmosphere through language alone but also forces you (at least in my case) to stop and start to a jarring extent. An original piece for sure.
I take your point re stop/start, but for me that was a plus. I wish it were 365 pages long and I could read it at the rate of a page per day. Somewhat paradoxically, I have one of his other novels, Amaryllis Night and Day, written in conventional prose and, despite repeated attempts, I've never made it past the first twenty pages.