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In City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented the literature of the fantastic. You hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you've ever visited--an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.
City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading--and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he's made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he's really from a place called Chicago....
By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and "eyewitness" reports invokes a universe within a puzzlebox where you can lose--and find--yourself again.
tetrachromat: Seems likely Vandermeer was inspired by Lovecraft. Both have "subterranean terrors". Tons of other similarities too, though thankfully lacking Lovecraft's racist commentary.
In progress: The only other book I've read by Vandermeer is Borne, which I quite liked. This is as different from that as it is possible to be. Very imaginative, fairly original. Reminds me of The Vorhh by B. Catling.
Dradin, In Love: the prose is nice, but I thought the story was kind of predictable. The twist was not a twist, for me, because I have read something similar and thus saw it coming. The setting and prose style were arresting, but the actual story, not so much.
Put it down for a few weeks, picked it up again.
The Goegbotton Guide to the Early History of the City of Ambergris: Different style altogether. An early history of the conquest and renaming of Ambergris, and the genocide of its first inhabitants. And its second inhabitantants. More of a horror vibe couched in a dry and meandering but strangely compelling narrative voice. Not unlike Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances. Read the footnotes.
This was an odd one! With the China Mieville quotes dripping off the cover, I guess it's framed as some of that "New Weird."
It's not a novel; it's a collection of documents, presented as source material, around the central cultural whirlpool of the fictional city of Ambergris. There's an absolutely overflowing and overwrought love story about a priest-for-hire. There's a snarky historical tract, full of references to Ambergris authors and historians, sprinkled with hilarious footnotes. There's a self-published tract on the Freshwater Squid and the festival of destruction that celebrates it. There's a race of mushroom people who live under the city. There is Ambergrisian fiction and art criticism...And more, and more.
Some of it fascinates, some of it sort of thuds. But the humor and verbal pyrotechnics hold together the world he has crafted, and you come away believing in the city, its freaky people, its mildew, its many odors.
It is not the author's fault the publisher made a comparison to Mieville. Nevertheless, the comparison is there. Crobuzon was an act of world-building; Saints & Madmen is a book about the act of world-building. I have nothing against that as a theme. The problem with this book is that... oh, how do I say this. It's an obsessive, intense, overly self-aware look into the world-building, but I never got to see the world enough to love it as much as the author. There is nothing to carry me through the overlaid narrative, nothing to help me share in the obsession enough to want to keep reading. I did keep reading nonetheless, and there are a few moments, sections, that show an interesting imagination and an ability to compel. Those are the moments that made me want to like this. I just wish there were more of them. ( )
This is not so much a story but rather an insight into a world through random snippets of it. From interactions between people to research, there is a lot going on here. I love world building, but I don't know. This wasn't exactly what I expected (to be fair, I didn't know what I was expecting - this wasn't it though.) Some parts were lots of fun but there were other parts I just kind of skimmed through as well. ( )
Here's the problem with this book. I really liked it. I appreciate intricate world building, I love the postmodern fantasy stuff, and I'm a sucker for any fiction with footnotes. The problem is, Ambergris still operates in a patriarchy (or at least, there's no reason to assume it doesn't) and this book fails the Bechdel test so hard it's like an F minus. I don't require that books take place in an all-women lesbian feminist utopia (would be nice to live there, but kind of boring to read about) but when so much design and creativity has been put into a book, it's an embarrassing oversight to not address gender as something that could also be rewritten. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
"What can be said about Ambergris that has not already been said? Every minute section of the city, no matter how seemingly superfluous, has a complex, even devious, part to play in the communal life. And no matter how often I stroll down Albumuth Boulevard, I never lose my sense of the city's incomparable splendor--its love of ritual, its passion for music, its infinite capacity for the beautiful cruelty." --Voss Bender, Memoirs of a Composer, Vol. No. 1, page 558, Ministry of Whimsy Press
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For Ann, who means more to me than words
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Dradin, in love, beneath the window of his love, staring up at her while crowds surge and seethe around him, bumping and bruising him all unawares in their bright-roughed thousands.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A footnote on the purpose of these footnotes: This text is rich with footnotes to avoid inflicting upon you, the idle tourist, so much knowledge that, bloated with it, you can no longer proceed to the delights of the city with your customary mindless abandon.
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The briny aftertaste is particularly unpleasant, reminiscent of the frequent (and didactic) postscripts Dr. V's mother added to the letters she sent him when he was a student at the Blythe Academy so many years ago.
In City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented the literature of the fantastic. You hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you've ever visited--an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.
City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading--and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he's made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he's really from a place called Chicago....
By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and "eyewitness" reports invokes a universe within a puzzlebox where you can lose--and find--yourself again.
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The only other book I've read by Vandermeer is Borne, which I quite liked. This is as different from that as it is possible to be. Very imaginative, fairly original. Reminds me of The Vorhh by B. Catling.
Dradin, In Love: the prose is nice, but I thought the story was kind of predictable. The twist was not a twist, for me, because I have read something similar and thus saw it coming. The setting and prose style were arresting, but the actual story, not so much.
Put it down for a few weeks, picked it up again.
The Goegbotton Guide to the Early History of the City of Ambergris: Different style altogether. An early history of the conquest and renaming of Ambergris, and the genocide of its first inhabitants. And its second inhabitantants. More of a horror vibe couched in a dry and meandering but strangely compelling narrative voice. Not unlike Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances. Read the footnotes.