John Hawkes, The Cannibal, A Microcosm of war-torn Germany

"All Germany Revolved around Balamir. His feet were in the boots of an Emperor's son, he felt the silver sword of time and tide and strength against his hip. Growing weak and cold, he was the result of commands coming down out of the years. From the farm where he was born to the institution to the munition works, he felt that people bowed as they passed. How he sought to be that image, how the Kaiser's ghost needed him, how he would be honor in the land he had become. But how well he knew it was a reign of terror and felt like pulling his beard like his father would have done. Potentate of the north, he scowled on his subjects, the trees, the chips of broken glass, brass casings and beaten fuse ends, but alone he smiled on his castle walls. He was the true and unknown prince of Spitzen-on-the-Dein, followed by the castrated and the disillusioned, guided by an unknown hand around the signs of the skull and cross-bones planted above the mines. He had crept about the door of the Duke's apartment, watched the tall man come and go. He used to walk in the institutions garden, and now, in the last days of the decline of his kingdom, he was befriended in the home of twittering birds.
     The vapors of the canal grew stronger, the Duke gained a hundred feet and eased his pace, cracks and holes in the earth filled with night dew.
     I unstrapped my pistol and put it on the floor."

                                                                                -John Hawkes, The Cannibal


Another author hard to place and compare. His writing and his books could often be more easily compared to impressionistic paintings than the novels of more conventional and less experimental writers. He once said "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained." This is not to say that his novels are completely bereft of these things, but they kind of pop up second hand to what he is focusing on. The story is told in meticulously described scenes, a kind of verbal mise-en-scene that can show to us things transcendentally beautiful or nightmarish and bleak and everywhere in between. He can be tough to follow at first, but once your brain stops trying to fit his books within more traditional conventions, he'll eventually absorb and entrance you.