THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK (https://www.ligotti.net/index.php)

- Off Topic (https://www.ligotti.net/forumdisplay.php?f=72)

- - Atmosphere (https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=9529)

Quote:

Originally Posted by xylokopos (Post 114232)

I think that atmosphere in literature might be relatively easy to recognize but very hard to define. For example, it is obvious to me that HPL's dream-cycle and Dunsanian stories all share a certain kind of atmosphere: they take place at the intersection of longing and melancholy and under the illumination of a perpetually setting sun. If you ask me to explain any better, I will probably find another poetic formulation that will appear bombastic or pompous to someone who has not read the stories but that will immediately be understood by someone who has.

In the same vein, I offer that Borges, Eco, Calvino and Paul Auster breath within the same atmosphere in many of their works, an atmosphere I would designate as one of intellectual wonderlust or delight. I would then go a step further and state this atmosphere to have a tangible equivalent in the Wunderkammer or Cabinets of Curiosities of the Baroque Era naturalists.

The novels of the existentialist philosophers also have a shared atmosphere, one that is saturated by the insidious indifference [often perceived as hostility] of the inanimate. And perhaps the best example of this is to be found not in something written by Camus or Sartre, but in The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, where the manifestation of the natural is always hostile, alien and suffocating.

There are two collections of short stories by Michael Ende [of the Neverending Story fame], the Mirror in Mirror and the Prisons of Freedom, the former having the additional distinction of being somewhat illustrated by the author's father who was a surrealist painter of some renown, which might be exercises at retelling a dream in the form of a parable or perhaps recasting a fable in the form of a prose-poem or indeed turning a painting into a tableaux of words.

I could go on but I don't want to bore you to death.

I tried to get hold of an English translation of The Mirror in the Mirror a few years back, but was unable. Perhaps I should try again.

Quote:

Originally Posted by qcrisp (Post 114233)

I tried to get hold of an English translation of The Mirror in the Mirror a few years back, but was unable. Perhaps I should try again.

Briefly checked over at amazon and new copies of the Mirror in Mirror go for 500 dollars; used, over 200. To my knowledge, The Prison of Freedom has never been translated to English. If you can read German, it sells for about 100 dollars. I read both collections in Greek translation at some point in the mid-90s, in quick succession and have been unable to locate either one in any language in any place I have lived in since.

Both collections are extraordinary. If you like Schulz or Borges or you enjoy the kind of story you would find in the Arabian Nights , or you like optical illusions or philosophical paradoxes or architectural curiosities, well, you get the idea, you will love these stories. I remember most of them as if I read them last week and not 20 years ago. The story of the man who takes the same bus to return home after work every day until the day the bus takes a different route, all the way to the sea. The story about finding your dream home painted on canvas and not knowing where on earth - or beyond it - it is. The story about free will and the impossibility of choice. The story about lovers crossing a desert to meet each other only to walk past each other, both in time and space.

All of the stories have a dreamlike iconography, it rains indoors, frame-less doors are bizarre gateways to other worlds, a strange minotaur lives alone in a vast, edible edifice...truly great stuff, I am filled with nostalgia just writing about them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murony_Pyre (Post 114102)

As for the the half heard song lyrics and endings to films you caught 3/4 of the way through---utter fact: to witness them whole is to rent them asunder. One instance that readily comes to mind: I caught the ending of Cronenberg's Shivers as a child (the pool scene) on late-night tv in unfamiliar surroundings (atmosphere conducive all/on its own). I thought it must surely be a great horror film. I can now apprehend that it was the possible context of the scene--not knowing same, that--built up in mind as the years went by and then, one day, I blundered upon Shivers in a discount VHS liquidation place. I viewed it in all its grainy, seedy, seventies entirety and it did irretrievably lose the eeriness and disjointed fascination the child's mind had imbued the scene (I had originally caught out of context) with.

I think Italo Calvino had exactly the wrong idea with ...if on a winter's night a traveler, in that as great as the book is, I think it would have been even better if he'd applied his abruption technique not to the first chapters of however many imaginary books, but the penultimate ones. The first chapter of any book is usually the most boring in that it provides all the context but none of the real development, while the next to the last chapter is usually the best, even when taken out of context (threads of the context are still visible of course, in the same way that if you cut a deep steak out of a random animal you'll still be able to see a cross section of the veins and arteries running through it).

Guy De Maupassant's later stories suffocate me in a way i've never been suffocated before in terms of atmosphere. I don't believe, though, that he was choosing every word and sentence carefully. I think it was a genuinely rare admixture of his previous training as a writer combined with his incipient mental illness/syphillis.