Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll(1865)
A girl falls through a rabbit hole and finds that the rules governing size, language, and politeness have all been quietly rescinded. Carroll, an Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson, first told this story to three sisters on a July afternoon in 1862, rowing up the Thames, and the tale never lost the quality of that golden improvisation. Every creature Alice meets speaks with lunatic precision, each conversation a small logical catastrophe. The Cheshire Cat grins without a face. A trial proceeds without evidence. What appears to be nonsense is in fact sense taken to its merciless conclusion, and the child who navigates it all does so with a courtesy that amounts to courage. Wonderland is not an escape from reason but its fever dream.
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Kafka wakes his protagonist into the same inexplicable transformation, but nobody finds it wonderful.
Swift sends another rational person into a series of impossible societies, but the satire has teeth where Carroll has nonsense.
Calvino builds a world where the rules keep changing and the reader is as lost as Alice.