Essential Salo-Forum Novels and Novelists

perkunos Saturday 12 Aug 2017 at 6:03 AM

I had forgotten I was tagged here.
I confess I will respectfully disagree that there is anything particularly Salo about Jack Vance, and while I enjoy what fiction of his I have read, I enjoyed obvious trash like Conan books, Lovecraft, or "Space Viking" by H. Beam Piper (forgotten and good) more. Most science fiction is schlock; I include Dune and especially Heinlein in this categorization. Zelazny was one of the better ones; maybe I should read this "Lords of Light" some day. Science fiction is ridiculously overrated because it says "science" in the name (usually, it isn't). Old school Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dennis Wheatley and H. Rider Haggard novels are ridiculously underrated. Other stuff on the entertainment front: Ring Lardner's short stories are great and super mean spirited. Lucius Shepard has good short stories; the Jaguar Hunter really stuck with me.

Hesse on the other hand, is very Salo , though it kind of bothers me that he is. Ernst Junger Glass Bees is probably more Salo than anything he has written, and Marble Cliffs is one of the most perfect things I have read. Oddly I don't think Eumeswil is essential Salo reading, though it is essential reading for modernity.

Chic nihilism is overrepresented among French writers; Houllebecq of course, Stendhal. Dumas much more so than Victor Hugo. Lautreamont is the most chic nihilist thing it is physiologically possible to read. I also liked Jan Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa. There's a polack movie (it was written in french) -I haven't seen it.

There's a lot of historical fiction I like. Gore Vidal is good. Aubrey-Mauterin series of books is better than anything Vidal did, as is anything by Robert Graves (Vidal's Julian, which I enjoyed very much, was basically a shit tier version of 'Belisarius') and the Prohaska tetralogy (thanks Derb) is also better than Vidal. Salo? I don't know. Are Flashman novels?

I haven't read the Sea of Fertility novels by Mishima yet, though BAP has made me promise to do so. I suspect other novelists from Japan may be better, even if they're not OurGuys as Mishima was.

Tito Perdue is the greatest living American novelist at present as far as I can tell (possibly the greatest living novelist). He's also one of us, which is nice to know. I think The New Austerities is salo-maximo. I can't put him in any category; he's like Melville and Mishima collided with Faulkner.

Moby Dick is my favorite novel, mostly because it's about the clash of titanic powers rather than faggot soap operatics. As such, it's more like reading the Iliad or Paradise Lost. Novels are either fantasy or quasi-realism about neurotic Russian or French people drinking tea and having miscarriages. The obsessiveness of the quest and the beautiful language ... Normies don't like it: either it's something about a big fish, or they expect their novels to have some kind of cheap theatrics and moral lesson instead of mute awe in the face of the forces of nature and a powerful will. Is it Salo ? Probably not. But you normies should read it anyway. Just like you should read other legendary classics like the Anabasis and the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. There's more HPLovecraft in this passage than in all of HPL for example

By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs, He saw God's foot upon the trendle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

It's rare that I pick up a novel these days. Most of it is just bad. Would rather read classics or philosophy.

Macrobius Saturday 12 Aug 2017 at 6:13 AM

It's pretty well known that Moby Dick deals with Zoroastrian themes. Melville was a dualist.

Dropping the above sentence in a search engine will get you plenty of hits.

Alarusskiyan Wednesday 16 Aug 2017 at 3:48 PM

I ventured into Perdue on a recommendation from Cornelio via Perkunos (many, many thanks) in another thread. Perdue stands alone.

I started by purchasing the William's House tetralogy (2015-2016), an expansive study on the formation and development of a certain young man, Albert Pefley. Perdue delivers an enormous world for an endless boy to play in.

After William's House , I ventured back (as is habit) to read the first/early works of an author. I went to the library and grabbed Lee (1991). That novel was a sign of things to come; even though I felt extremely trapped in Leland Pefly's expiring world (a claustrophobic feeling, probably not too far from reality of the elderly), the stage was set for Perdue's subsequent works.

I am about to wrap up Morning Crafts (2012), a nice follow-up to Lee . I will be buying The New Austerities (1994) next.

Also, I'd love to raise funds for distributing Perdue's works throughout the Little Free Library system (of which my region houses the first chartered Little Free Library , among many of the first few hundred). American youth will be blessed to have Leland and Albert as fellow adventurers through modern life.

RandallRoark Wednesday 16 Aug 2017 at 10:00 PM

I have to raise an objection to the dismissal of Tolkien as a "minor architect" of fiction.
He was working with themes of media ecology concurrent with Marshall McLuhan, though his approach was more openly moralistic as opposed to McLuhan's assumed air of a dispassionate diagnostician. I suspect this is the source of many of the accusations of Tolkien's naivete- what seems on the surface to be an overly simplistic dualism. I would argue that Tolkien's ideas of good and evil are actually sophisticated, and their clear and obvious delineation does not strike me as intellectual laziness, but rather a bold assertion that is actually very hard to pull off in a way that doesn't bore intelligent readers.
It seems to me that Tolkien is perfectly "Salo", after all the whole story of LotR has at it's core the very Spenglerian idea that technics and magic arise from the same impulse(and this is a Spenglerian board, after all). For Tolkien, being a Catholic, this impulse towards power, the "magical" mode of thought, is the same impulse that led to the fall of man in Genesis, and he places in opposition to this what he calls "enchantment" which is essentially the Christian idea of theosis.
Above all else, he intended the story to be a joy to read, to be "enchanting" in accordance with the theme of the book itself, and not a work of "magic". He succeeded in this goal spectacularly, and because of this LotR is often written off as a "good story" and nothing more, like a Dumas novel. If Homer wrote The Odyssey today I'm sure it would receive the same treatment.

Essential Salo-Forum Novels and Novelists

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