A Stranger in Olondria is the most lyrical, engrossing novel I've read in quite a while.

Jevick inherits his father's pepper estate and, for the first time, makes the annual journey to the pepper market of cosmopolitan Olondria. Jevick has never left his rural island home, but he has grown up immersed in the literature of Olondria—his tutor is an exiled Olondrian scholar, and Jevick is the first of his people to become literate.

The story that follows is a picaresque adventure, a romance, a ghost story, a postcolonial novel, and a profound meditation on the transformative, ambivalent power of stories. Samatar excels stylistically—her dense, lush descriptions remind me both of Salman Rushdie and of lyrical modernist poets like H.D. It's her characters, however, that make this a really exceptional novel and kept me reading—they are the real thing, the "Mrs. Brown" of the Le Guin essay, and their voices stayed with me after I finished the book.

I'd love to discuss this book in a group setting—there are a lot of Big Ideas here, some of which blindsided me when they cropped up near the end. Samatar is dealing with the intersections between cultures and ways of life, a topic fantasy and science fiction is so good at addressing, and it's challenging material. (Sample book club questions: Do stories save us or merely haunt us? Can we ever truly know another culture or another person, or do we just tell stories to ourselves?)

Finally, I really, really like that this is a fantasy novel and not magical realism set in our world. If you have ever wished for some productive cross-pollination between postcolonial literature and speculative fiction (or wished you were smart enough to wish for such a thing), pick up this book. ( )

This is the sort of book that sits with you and forgets to leave, and at some point you turn around from whatever you're doing and realize you're still thinking about it.

It's a ruminative story, with a slowly building story. Big stuff happens, but it unspools rather than explodes, and the protagonist, Jevick, doesn't carry the day and save the kingdom: he is a heartbeat in a grander political and religious conflict. I'd say A Stranger in Olondria is demonstrative of the ongoing erosion between the barriers of genre (which I'm defining right now by pulp conventions, rapid plot, etc) and literary (which I'm defining as prose- and character-motivated) work. The heart of the story is the main character's personal transformation.

Also, there are ghosts and lyric poetry. Unlike the poetry in nearly any other novel I've read, it's beautiful and moves the story.
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recenzie pe larg https://bloguldesefe.ro/2021/05/15/prins-intre-credinta-si-ratiune-un-strain-in-... ( )

This is a hard book to review. On just the prose itself, it's a 4 or 5 stars. This book is gorgeous. The language is lovely and musical. Plot wise, it was again, high - there was a good premise. For actual execution, however, probably a 2. Gorgeous language, unfortunately, just does not make up for very slow and uneven pacing.

The first half of the book was Jevick learning about Olondria, the land of books and writing, and then actually going there himself after his father's death. He spends much of his time as a loafer and playboy, enjoying food, books, and women. This section was arguably the slowest portion of the book. Things pick up slightly with the appearance of Jissavet's ghost, though it isn't until Jevick falls in with the Priestess of Avalei that I started really getting into the story.

Another thing that kept bugging me was that I did not like either Jevick or Jissavet. Jevick, despite being the protagonist, did not exhibit much agency and was instead solely an agent of the plot. He largely allowed others to determine his fate and it wasn't until toward the end of the story that he made decisions for himself, which to the credit of the development of the character, were selfless. Jissavet was a brat, and I think she was fully aware of that. She acknowledges she had no respect or understanding for her mother and thought herself above her mother. Whether that was just an aspect of her personality or a manifestation of her kyitna was a bit unclear, but either way, I had very little sympathy for her in life or in death, where she essentially bullied Jevick to get her way.

At the end, I finally understood this was a book about the power of books and writing and learning.

A Stranger in Olondria is not written in an easy-to-read manner, deliberately, I think. It mimics some of the classics of previous generations, with rambling prose that is hard to follow for someone (read: me) accustomed the straight-forwardness of contemporary publishing. Which makes me realize it's been a very long time since I sat down with Lord Dunsany or Tolkien and gotten immersed in the prose, focusing on the language rather than the plot. The speculative fiction genre seems to have forgotten its roots, and Sofia Samatar appears to be trying to revitalize a love and appreciation for language in the genre. ( )

DNF at 29%

This seemed interesting at first, but I couldn't get attached to the main character, which is the only one with a bit of a personality, and the long descriptions and excerpts of books the main character was reading made me really really bored.
It might work for someone that is looking for an atmospheric book centered on a main character with a love for a specific city and poems, but it didn't work for me.