Riddley Walker
Books | Fiction / General
Russell Hoban
Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state--and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture--rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.--From publisher description.
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Author
Russell Hoban
Pages
235
Publisher
Indiana University Press
Published Date
1998
ISBN
9780253334480 0253334489
Community ReviewsSee all
"Somewhere along the line, this book ended up on a "to read" list and I don't know how. But a year after putting it there I looked at the description. It sounded completely foreign to me, but a very interesting read. <br/><br/>It is a difficult language to get around. I read A Clockwork Orange in high school and grew to love the language and how deciphering added a feeling of pride. RW was much harder than that. Parts were incomprehensible to me. The post-apoc world described is interesting, but you don't get much of a back story. Only some fabled lore filtered down through 300 years of primitive storytelling. <br/><br/>I liked it, but it was a chore. If the beginning or middle drags for you, I'd say to stick with it because I found the imagery of the last quarter the most rewarding."
Andrew Greene