10 books like The Exploits of Engelbrecht

W.E. Bowman’s comic novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle, has achieved a cult status among mountaineers as well as aficionados of spoof adventure stories. But the sequel is much less well-known, and that’s a shame, for it is absolutely its equal in terms of humour and invention and, if anything, even more absurd and fantastical in the development of the plot, which concerns a voyage on a raft (in the manner of Thor Heyerdahl) in search of a fabled school of talking fish. I am convinced that Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns was influenced by Bowman’s work, and if not, then this is a case of great minds thinking alike.

Flann O’Brien is famous for his ingenious novels, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, but I regard his funniest book as this short fictional memoir about life in the far West of Ireland. Originally published in Gaelic in 1941, it is a mock-pastoral farce about the customs of the remotest region in the country, where it rains all the time, but O’Brien is actually satirising the lack of mutual understanding between the local inhabitants and the modern outside world. The narrator’s adventures begin immediately after he is born and include (among many other absurdities) catastrophic pigs and the quest to climb a mountain to find an eternal fountain of whisky.

In an alternative version of our own society, where jazz music serves all the functions of our present-day internet and cats and mice can talk, there exist two couples who are heading towards disaster because of philosophy and love. In the meantime, they enjoy everything life has to offer, including cocktails made by playing a special type of piano (wrong notes produce alarming flavours) and the fact that inanimate objects can respond to their emotional states. The novel is genuinely poignant as well as incredibly odd, and the evolving story, and the language in which it is told, are always surprising. 

This book is luminous. The world of everyday reality and the world of magic overlap and interact and influence each other. There are philosophers and gods, leprechauns and (once again) taking animals, and women wiser than all of them put together. The plot concerns a crime that never occurred and various types of bizarre trouble that result from it. Adventures follow adventures in a picaresque manner, not all of them necessarily connecting with any other, a free and easy approach that gives great fluidity to the whimsical narrative.

This book is one of my all time favorite reads. Mount Analogue is a short poetic novel. Daumal’s rich descriptions and symbolism engaged my imagination and made me think deeply about the story’s meaning. The author takes readers on a journey to a mystical place with an unusual set of characters and strange circumstances. The story revolves around an adventurous sailing and climbing expedition to a mystical mountain hidden from the world’s inhabitants which is believed to link the earth to a higher sphere of reality. It’s full of intrigue and packed with pithy philosophical statements worth pondering. Daumal’s words and descriptions are so thought-provoking, that I used a quote from this book as the opening to my memoir, If I Live Until Morning.

While written from a Yugoslav perspective, this book is a fascinating study of films made using unconventional methods, materials, and equipment, including ‘written films’: films that exist as texts and that would be impossible to make as films. Levi draws on the historical and the post-war avant-garde; Dada, Surrealism, Lettrisme, Structural-Materialist film, and other movements that constitute a material and ideological rejection of conventional cinema and the way it treats the medium as a mere means to an end. In these works, produced in Japan, Europe, and the USA, the technology is turned on itself, interrogated, and repurposed to anti-illusionistic ends.

Some of the stories in this collection, like my own stories, use surreal metaphor, expressing poetic imagery in prose form; others are more about the thrill of absurdity. Though surrealism existed before the term or movement existed (in visual art and literature e.g. Lewis Carroll, Hieronymus Bosch, etc.), Andre Breton and his mates really went for it. Here you can read works by Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and more. What I love about all of these artists is their obvious joy in discovering the surreal or poetic image, a joy I know well, and their absolute passion for the importance and potency of expressing such imagery. 

This comic is a 1:1 dream story. It has the weirdness and absurdity of dreams. It is about Juliet herself and is an autobiographical classic. And it made me wonder how very personal feelings in your dreams are actually universal. It also has feministic potential, being very honest with all its dreamy gender chaos and strangeness. And it’s funny.

My first introduction to the surreal in art was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. My first introduction to the art movement of surrealism was seeing Max Ernst’s "Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale". I was astounded that you were allowed to do that. Then I discovered Magritte (and later Escher) and saw that the anarchy of surrealism could be put to the most profound use, that of exploring life beyond the material. Magritte uses conventional representation to undermine that very convention and puncture so-called reality in a way that is a joy to look at. This is a decent book on his life and work. Magritte reminds us things are not what they seem… and that’s a good thing.

Promenade is a gift for anyone who, like me, loves books. What I like most is the concept itself: a tribute to books, to what they make us feel. They can be the vehicle of a great journey, a refuge, or the door to a new world. The dreamlike and surreal illustrations are so evocative that they do not need accompanying text. Another concept that seems very interesting to me is that, in addition to presenting the book as a magical object, it also makes it an object of great value: it is a large-format book, with a very careful edition and a print that extols the beautiful illustrations. These are details that I love because they make it a perfect book gift.