I want to start reading novels again, and I've enjoyed reading so-called postmodern books in the past, like Jonathan Safran Foer and Murakami.

So far, I've the following on my list:

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
A Pale View of Hills, The Buried Giant, and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Midnight Children by Salman Rushdie

Anything Murakami released in the 80s-90s; haven't decided what.

Something by Michel Houellebecq; also undecided.

Same with Jorge Luis Borges.

Have you any further recommendations?

 

Those two aren't straight up novels, but theory-fiction.

Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani

— I've not read this one at all, but it's been on my peripheral for a hot minute now. It's been described as 'a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets.'

More from the blurb:

Spoiler: blurb

'The Middle East is a sentient entity—it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives.

A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along.

Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...

Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III

— I've read the first chapter, and other sections of this already. I'm firmly on the left, centre or far depending on who's looking, and I don't quite know what to make of this. The writing is pretty good; I don't think I've seen such a vibrant description of a panic attack before. There's a short letter he writes for his mother near the end of the book that made me cry.

This is a spoiler, but here's a haunting and chilling poem from the first chapter:

Spoiler: poem

for Halloween, I washed my

face and wore my

school clothes went door to

door as a nightmare.

 

Have you read any Nabokov? He is a famous postmodern novelist. In particular there is Lolita, which depicts the relationship between an adult and a young girl from the adult’s, Humbert Humbert, perspective. The prose is beautiful, clashing with and perhaps trying to conceal the main character’s moral failings.

I also really enjoyed his Pale Fire, which is a poem by a fictional poet with a commentary by his neighbor/colleague. This is a great postmodern experiment because it uses different genres and shows how tenuous the relationship is between language and meaning (the poem and the commentary).

I like Murakami quite a lot too. If you like his magical realism you should check out Gabriel Garcia Marquez—his prose is quite beautiful and he has many mysterious/magical moments. One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera are my favorites.

I also recommend Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to go along with Midnight’s Children. SV is more on the individual level (one character becomes angelic the other satanic) and not the generational like MC, but still really great look at immigration, society, transformation.

Hope you enjoy these!

 

Tim O'Brian -- "The Things They Carried."

Literal masterwork of metafiction. I cannot express how much I love that book.

 

Houellebecq is weird. At some point all of his novels blend into one and you’re stuck in some sort of never ending melodramatic fever dream. I would frame his work as “melancholic neoliberalism”. Which is weird.

Nathalie Léger has a few interesting (auto?)biographical pieces. Suite for Barbara Loden is a telling of the story of the author through the exploration of the life of a deceased film director.

Milan Kundera’s Slowness is framed similarly. The novel weaves between an imagined past and a present to explore ideas of how one comes to perceive the world around them.

David Foenkinos has a bunch of novels that are very chick-flicky (they’re the type of garbage that tickles the same parts of the brain that fanfiction does) but have some thematic potency. Delicacy is a novel that has major incel undertones but touches on some points on the brevity of the human experience.

 

Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 might be interesting - it checks pretty much all of the postmodern boxes.

Also seconding Nabokov's Lolita: despicable material wrapped in beautiful prose. Worth a read for the prose alone.

Edit: an edge case might be Beckett's Godot. It precedes what's typically seen as the postmodern period, but it does have some characteristics of postmodern literature. If you're not averse to plays, I'd give this one a shot. Beckett is always worth a look.