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Trash in Contemporary Literature
I’m looking for recent books that have made trash a major theme The obvious one here is Underworld, and I know there must be more. If you can think of one, let me know in the comments–you’ll be doing me a great service!
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Biblioklept on Patience (After Sebald)
Stealing from Conversational Reading
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
There’s the whole Great Concavity subplot.
“Too Loud A Solitude”, Bohumil Hrabal, story of a papercrusher saving books from the trash.
Of course! That’s a good one in conjunction with Underworld.
Waste by Eugene Marten–an impressive, but EXTREMELY creepy little book…a bit of a different take on “trash” than either DeLillo’s or Hrabal’s…
I just started reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood” and already I get the idea that the world is full of not only trash, but decaying bodies and such. I don’t know if this is quite what you are looking for, but I must say, her writing is so vivid I can actually smell the putrification.
It seems that Richard beat me to Eugene Marten’s “Waste.” You’d also be remiss not to consider A.R. Ammons’ book-length poem, “Garbage.”
“Love and Garbage” by Ivan Klima, though I don’t know if garbage is a big a theme in this books as you’re seeking.
gemini, by michel tournier
l’olympe des infortunes, by yasmina khadra
there’s another one about some people who live in a garbage dump in egypt? lebanon? turkey? yugoslavia? there’s a fight between the women and the men, their life is changed by something — for the life of me, i can’t remember the name of the book. it wasn’t part of the satanic verses, was it?
Mitchell:
Sounds like you might be describing Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills by Latife Tekin. Rather good, have read it myself.
http://www.amazon.com/Berji-Kristin-Tales-Garbage-Hills/dp/0714530115/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268694720&sr=1-3
A. R. Ammons, Garbage, 1993.
garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual…
I’m sure you’ve already thought of it: , home of WASTE (We Await Silent Trystero’s Empire”).
I’m sure you’ve already thought of it: The Crying of Lot 49, home of WASTE (We Await Silent Trystero’s Empire”).
Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler. A funny, contemporary novel from Quebec, set in Montreal about fish, pirates, and yes, garbage.
george:
that’s the one! thanks.
I would’t say that garbage is a major theme, but in both Tranquility and City Sister Silver, garbage, garbage collection and garbage dumps have complex meanings both personal, for the characters, and political, giving readers a sense of how global capitalism is restructuring society–in Hungary and other former Soviet Eastern European nations.
Walter Moser has an article somewhere on the web on Garbage and Recycling, where deals with garbage and trash as literary theme in a bunch of novels.
Let’s not forget the classics – Hercules’ fifth labour was to clean out the Augean Stables which was full of dung – a labour which was meant to humiliate the hero. But by using his brains, Hercules manages to clean out the stables.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/stables.html
“A rag-picker who picks up garbage early in the gray morning. Muttering darkly to himself, getting a bit drunk, he spears the remains of speeches and fragments of words with his stick, and throws them into his cart. Occasionally he picks up scraps of these hackneyed phrases like “human beings,” “innerness,” and “deepen,” and flutters them contemptuously in the morning breeze. He is the morning garbage collector, but this morning is the morning of the day of the revolution.”- Walter Benjamin