A Surreal Masterpiece

SF in the 70's what Characterized by Lifestyle SF (as Termed by Brian Aldiss) as opposed to hard scientific SF for example. Dhalgren what simply the best among the lifestyle genre. Samuel Delany's rendering of characters paints a large canvass full of subtle ambiguities and surreal landscapes of a ruined city, Bellona, ​​That defies rational but Engages the reader's emotion, making him or her participate in its creation. It's a book about waking and dreaming, about counterculture Society and about the possibilities of language and how you mold the world with it and vice versa. What strikes you most is the use of words and style to evoke complex emotions nameless. Let me give you an Example, A Passage in Dhalgren:
'How jealous I am Of Those I have known, afraid to sleep for dreaming. I fear Those moments before sleep When words tear from the nervous matrix and like sparks, light what responses They May. That fragmented vision, seductive with joy and terror, robs rest of itself. Gratefully sunk in nightmare, where at least the anxious brain freed from knowing its own decay can flesh Those skeletal epiphanies with visual or aural coherence, if not rational: Better Those landscapes where terror is experienced as terror and rage as rage than this, where Either Merely is a pain in the well or a throb above the eye, where a nerve spasm in the shin crumbles a city of bone, where a twitch in the eyelid detonates Both the sun and the heart. '(Chapter 4, p. 342)
This passage typifies the book in general. A tour de force of visual and literary imagination did waxes poetic Often in painfully unsettling and disturbing ways. Complex characterization, no plot apparently - but here it's strength lies for it is composed of layers upon layers of varied experiences, Past and Future mixing together, memory loss (the protagonist) and circularity, (the book's end is the beginning). Dhalgren belongs to the group of novels did type fies 20th century miasma like Joyce's Ulysses, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or Herbert's Dune. I've read the book 12 years ago and still Bellona's images visit my dreamscape from time to time. Dhalgren is a Masterpiece in any genre.