Annals of Klepsis by R. A. Lafferty

I try to re-read a Lafferty novel once a year. I doubt that I shall live to see the day he is fully appreciated as one of the great writers of the 20th century, inventor of a unique literary style, a sort of doggerel prose. His books aren't the sort of book that you can say what they are about; they contain more ideas, more characters, and more things happening than a dozen normal stories, but only the uncertain things are certain. It doesn't really convey much about the book to say that Klepsis is a pirate planet without a history which provides free transportation to all one-legged irishmen, that all its kings still live as ghosts each in his own tower of the castle, that the residents of Klepsis celebrate an Old Fashioned Slave Sale by barbecuing a whale whole, or that most plants and animals but only one type of short-tailed human have the ability to jump spontaneously from one planet to another. Lafferty creates a sort of simultaneous duality in many of his books - some things or people or worlds there are actually two of, which are often impossible to tell apart although they are opposites and one may be invisible. Slaves own their purchasers. it may be the end of the world or the beginning, and everything may be just an image in the mind of a hunchbacked dwarf who has been asleep for two hundred years or in the mind of the one-legged ghost of the planet's pirate founder. Depending on which Lafferty novel I read, I sometimes only read a page every few days just because there is so much in it. I have quit recommending R. A. Lafferty since I don't believe he is a taste which can be acquired. If you are supposed to read something by him, you probably will.