Angine de Poitrine! The video I took this screenshot from is at the end of today’s post.

I recently heard about a French-Canadian musical duo named Angine de Poitrine, and I must say that getting-very-popular group is delightfully quirky in its goofy appearance and mesmerizing songs.

The “q” word reminds me of some of the quirkiest authors and novels I’ve read over the years. Sometimes that quirkiness can be too much, but it’s often a nice change of pace…entertaining, compelling, and original. 

One of the first authors to come to mind is John Irving. He frequently deals with quite serious matters – war, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, etc., but mixes in all kinds of weird things. Bear appearances, wrestling situations, a deadly foul ball during a baseball game, and more. Life is unpredictable…

There’s also Franz Kafka’s writing, which is…Kafkaesque. 🙂 One obvious example is the human Gregor Samsa becoming a giant insect in that author’s The Metamorphosis.

Herman Melville got quirky in his rare 100%-land-based novel Pierre, which includes strong hints of incest as well as the author using his title character as a vehicle to obliquely reference Melville’s real-life dismay over the poor reception for his previous year’s Moby-Dick.

Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman? The title alone telegraphs just how oddly the author uses food in her debut novel.

Anthony Burgess’ dystopian A Clockwork Orange is also very offbeat with its slangy different language and more.

Or how about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five? It mixes horror, black humor, time travel, and more as it makes its antiwar points.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle features an isolated ultra-eccentric family, strange murders, and other eyebrow-raising content.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita includes the devil in its cast as well as a flying human (no airplane involved) and other fantastical elements.

Which reminds me that magic-realism novels, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, can also feature flying humans and other peculiar things.

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman includes absurd content such as cops who speak mostly in non sequiturs and are obsessed with bicycles.

And we can’t forget Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, who offers readers all kinds of surreal stuff: Alice’s body changing sizes, bizarre chess goings-on, the fading-away Cheshire Cat…

I’ll end by noting that there are novels that are mostly not weird but have at least one weird element. For instance, the tragic-yet-delightful ghost in Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

An Angine de Poitrine song:

Misty the cat says: “Before the rain the birds get noisy/That doesn’t mean I live in Boise.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about ICE agents again menacing my town and more — is here.