The best books whose descriptions of the real world make it seem unreal

Gerald Murnane describes the flat, boring landscape of Victoria, Australia and its minute variations with such crystalline clarity and sublime meaning that it resembles a dreamlike fiction, or a landscape viewed through a clear prism.

Murnane probes the boundaries between life and fiction, between landscape and mind. In between, he finds a membrane, a shimmering spiritual essence purer than either real life or fiction.

This book taught me that if one stares at the mundane world with enough hard objectivity, it can look more alien and beautiful than any amount of fanciful embellishment. It also demonstrates how a story can be told with no dialogue, no character names, and hardly any resolution, and yet can be as compelling as a conventionally written story.

Bruno Schulz describes life in his native Drohobych with such fanciful, dreamlike intensity that it seems somehow truer than an objective report.

With his alchemical vocabulary, he infuses an ecstatic, emotional truthfulness into his stories that would be impossible in a work of social realism. For this reason, Schulz was able to accomplish more on one page than most other authors could accomplish in thirty. 

In his stories, his cloth merchant father transforms into different animals according to his moods, casts magic spells onto furniture, and dresses in shining armor to guard against tickling. Also, Schulz’s darkly cartoonish descriptions of everyday life in Drohobych make it seem like a box full of broken toys, scrap paper, and spare mechanical parts. It’s great fun.

In the forests of France near the Belgian border during World War II, a French soldier is stationed in a bunker with his squad members.

They are ordered not to leave their posts and to be on the lookout for German tanks. Nothing happens for months except a long, snowy winter. The protagonist experiences a sense of liberation in this rural isolation that he relishes. His environment appears timeless, forever suspended in a gray, benevolent limbo filled with snow, mist, and conifers. He wishes his post would never end.

I love this book because it describes an introvert’s ideal environment: ensconcement, privacy, silence, freedom from larger society, and nature. It contains some of the most unique descriptions of splendid aloneness in the woods I have ever read.

The starkly monochrome world described by Kafka is a troubled nightmare of our own.

It is a grim, mazelike metropolis populated with characters lacking compassion or bravery. The protagonist, Herr K., is accused of an unnamed crime by a distant and inaccessible legal body, and he is forced to defend his innocence by using scant means that prove increasingly futile.

I am fascinated by the horrifying cartoon world that Kafka weaves. Bureaus and departments physically merge according to no discernable logic. All the characters are driven by fear, ignorance, and self-interest, and Kafka’s surface-level descriptions of their appearances and behaviors highlight the characters’ absurdity.

The Trial is the literary equivalent of a set of German Expressionist charcoal drawings and may serve as the most sophisticated horror story ever written. 

Of all the elements of this story, I feel the love triangle between Eustacia, Wildeve, and Clym is of secondary interest to the environment in which it takes place, which is the weird and lugubrious heathlands.

Perhaps I am unfamiliar with heaths; as far as I know, we don’t have any in the U.S. Hardy describes the British heathlands like the landscape of another planet. Largely flat with shallow hills and vales, it sometimes bursts with floral color, and depending on the weather, it can be beset with raking orange sunlight or gloomy palls of mist.

The locals are fond of lighting evening bonfires, and Hardy’s descriptions of the firelight dancing on their faces are mesmerizing and compellingly suggests an unbroken cultural link with Britain’s pagan past.