City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

£6.495
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City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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They are experts at the art of cataloguing passion, with this grave distinction: that when I say to you, sir, ‘passion,’ I mean the word in its most general sense, a sense that does not allow for intimacies of the kind that might strike the lady you wish to know better as too vulgar. It merely speaks to the general—the incorporeal, as one more highly witted than I might say. It shall not offend; rather, it shall lend to the gift-giver an aura of mystery that may prove permanently alluring.”

WARNING: This is not really a review, but City of Saints and Madmen requires something else entirely, and there may be a spoiler or two, but considering the book's form I doubt that will matter.* It's not that I don't see it--the book certainly has the right markers: the self-awareness, the meta-fictions, the ironies and self-contradictions, the allusions and in-jokes, the big, rearing ugliness of modern literature. And yet to say that it has those markers doesn't mean much--it's like saying that a math book has equations, it doesn't mean that they add up to anything. I was reminded quite profoundly of Mozart. I should mention that I'm not fond of Mozart's 'lighter' earlier works. Pretty as a picture as they may be, but there is for me, no soul, no real depth in them. However, I actually get goose bumps just thinking of his Requiem. I'm there again. There's something in it reminiscent of the moment after a car accident, where you're sitting in disbelief, trying to make sense of it, half laughing, half shaking your head.A highly sophisticated work of post-modern metafiction which uses a range of fictional documents (psychiatric reports, magazine articles, family histories, letters, essays, bibliographies etc) to construct a multidimensional collage, full of hundreds of fully cross-referenced stories-within-stories. Use of the word, “literary”, would not be unfounded, however meaningless that term may be.

When the collection was published in the United Kingdom by Tor Books in 2004, two extra stories were offered: There is no escape. You have to return to or remain in the world of Ambergris. It is our cage. And we can either sing or scream.For weeks now, the doctors in charge of this strange person (dubbed Mr. X by staff) have been regaled by Vandermeer’s psychotic ramblings, including outrageous claims that Ambergris exists solely as a figment of his imagination, that he comes from a world that exists on a “parallel dimension” to ours (such strange words, too!), lives in a world of flying buses he calls “airplanes”, boxes that provide entertaining moving pictures he calls “teevee”, large screens that show living paintings called “car tunes” drawn by a man named Walt Disney, and that he is originally from a city (larger in size and population than Ambergris, if such a thing were possible) with the unlikely name of Chicago. It's not only with his jokes and allusions that VanderMeer leaves nothing to chance, he has characters tell us in footnotes when we are supposed to think they are funny, he mentions when a certain part is deliberately over-written, or that we shouldn't trust some character, or that this point-of-view shift indicates a change in the character's personal identity. The New Weird genre as we see it in Vandermeer, started off with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Most people may know the first two authors mentioned as horror writers, and it is true that Vandermeer's stories contain a flavor of horror, though many of them are too humorous to be classed as horror. The stories also contain a whiff of the strange and absurd, and quite a bit of tongue-in cheek dark humor. Essentially, it is imaginative post-modernist fiction. The stories include a strong sense of self-referentiality. (For instance, some of them pose as history books or diaries.)

And yet, a true and accurate historical account has never truly been attempted, perhaps owing to the virtually impossible and uncapturable nature of the city itself. Any author of any literary merit, in the humble opinion of this reviewer, has simply never succeeded in capturing, pinning down, dissecting, chewing on, digesting, suffering gastrointestinal distress from, and regurgitating violently the majesty and glory of Ambergris. Features that I would remove a star or a half-star for: Some of the stories, especially An Early History of Ambergris, which I found slightly boring in places, are a bit too rambling and the author becomes a bit too indulgent with his "historian" conceit. Somebody who convinces themselves that they are in love can build a whole fantasy world around their love, without any real participation by the second character.The clerk, a rake of a lad with dirty brown hair and a face as subtle as mutton pie, winked wryly, smiled, and said, “I understand, sir, and I have precisely the book for you. It arrived a fortnight ago from the Ministry of Whimsy imprint—an Occidental publisher, sir. Please follow me.” Yet, there is a need in us to keep going, to keep carving away at our work--especially when we see the errors in it, which we always do. Once you've passed that point of no return, where each additional mark just muddles it a little bit more, it can be almost impossible to stop, to salvage something from it. Much easier to start over--and usually, to make the same mistake again. It's a lesson all artists need to learn: if you're going to be brave and create something, then be brave all the way through. Don't stop halfway to explain yourself. When you hand off your work for others to enjoy, don't include qualifiers and excuses--even though the urge to do so will be strong. You have to let the work stand on its own, and if you aren't willing to do that, then don't take on a monumental task, because the meddling will ruin it.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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