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Palimpsest

by Catherynne M. Valente (Goodreads Author), Aasne Vigesaa (Narrator)

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 · rating details · 1,900 ratings · 425 reviews

Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse -- a voyage permitted only to those who've always believed there's another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tat...more

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Published August 15th 2010 by Brilliance Audio (first published February 17th 2009)

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Apr 23, 2012 Ceridwen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-about-books, fantasy, incest-is-best, lgbt, necrophilia, pomo-a-go-go, ghost-stories, reviewed, audio

Cross-posted on Readerling

There are whole cities of me who could have hated this book, or been indifferent, or been casually affectionate, and then left the next morning - or even just as it ended - and then called four days later and been polite but firm that it was over. Books can be - they are - often like lovers. We hold them in our hands - or if the lights are off and we cannot see - they whisper in our ears, and it raises gooseflesh all over our bodies. Sometimes our teeth clank, or they a...more Cross-posted on Readerling

There are whole cities of me who could have hated this book, or been indifferent, or been casually affectionate, and then left the next morning - or even just as it ended - and then called four days later and been polite but firm that it was over. Books can be - they are - often like lovers. We hold them in our hands - or if the lights are off and we cannot see - they whisper in our ears, and it raises gooseflesh all over our bodies. Sometimes our teeth clank, or they are too rough, or not rough enough. Sometimes they fill us up. Sometimes the same lover is all of those things: teeth-clanking, giggling, shuttering, and perfect - but you met them on the wrong day, in the wrong mood, and its fumbling and awful. I met this book on the right day, the right days, and I loved it.

I don't listen to audio books that often. My mind makes sounds when I read, and when other people are making the sounds, my mind is left to wander like a horse that has pulled its picket. But I found myself on a ride north with no other adult to talk to, with this book sounding out in my ears, my restless mind penned into watching the road and the landscape. This is a novel of cities - of a city, Palimpsest - a sexually transmitted city. A contagious city, a city that enters into the body like a drug, and leaves its absence as surely as any withdrawal.

Four people - Sei, Ludovico, November and Oleg, each from their own countries - enter into Palimpsest through their own lovers and madnesses - and are bound by a frog goddess through lines of experience and string. There's something Narnian about it, but only as a departure point - the wardrobe full of mother's furs wearing its subtext as text. The language is aggressively adjectival and allusive, the plot not so much action as experience and the uncovering of memory. Even the sections that take place in the cities I can point to on a map - Rome, New York, Kyoto - had the too-vivid feeling of a fairy tale, or a dream. The characters are strange, bejeweled creatures who cannot live in this world. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't dream in black and white. That I do, or should, is one of the strangest things people tell me with credulity, so I understand these bee-loud almost-people.

There's a place in me that grows weary of the adjective, that prefers the unornamented. That place was out the window - the nodding scrub and twisted near-spring branches of the landscape was the stage this city grew onto. It was perfect. Palimpsest can only be returned to for the characters by sex with strangers - strangers who have the maps of neighborhoods tattooed on their skin by their own entrances and addictions. It's somewhere between erotic and disgusting the way it works, all this flesh and skin, and the leap to ecstasy and alarm that finds them once again in Palimpsest.

I've been with the same person for sixteen years, we finally counted out one of the evenings this week, and I still dream of sex with others, usually the dream-faceless, but occasionally, with upset, someone I know. Invariably, as I feel and move, I remember within the dream who I am, whom I have made my bed and life and children with, and I panic in the dream. The dreams don't spin to nightmare often, but it is disquieting to be someone else, to be somewhere else, in a city of dreams, and then wake up - but not often truly wake - and remember who I am. When I have nightmares where I fall and fall I often wake with the sensation that I have hit the bed. Or I run from monsters until I wake up with a charley horse and clutch my leg and writhe. That's this book.

I had to switch to paper after the rides north and back were completed - my house is loud and busy, and audio has no place in that - and I would fall into naps and dream the city, Palimpsest. However often my waking brain would bother itself with one too many description of smell or sound or touch, it would curl around those descriptions and play them out. For a city predicated on the vellum of monks stripped layer by layer and rewritten, leaving the trails on the skin on the eye, it was perfect.

One last thing: this book is an intertext with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Though that story was referenced here, it was written after, and September and her Green Wind - good God - what a thing. I'm just shivering with what Valente did with children's stories and retrospective adulthood and the stories we tell and are told and all of those devices, those devices that whir in our brains like damp clockwork, like maps to ourselves and others. I kept thinking of Autobiography of Red, where Anne Carson spoke of the magic of the adjective that reorders the noun, the place, and Valente's heavy adjectives do just that. Perfect for these bones, for this skin, for this grey brain. I put out my hands to touch. Lover, come to bed. (less)

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Jul 16, 2012 Nataliya rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: hugo-nebula, 2012-reads, valente-whimsical-magic, location-is-the-true-protagonist

Did I, a brand-spankin'-new gynecologist, just read a book about a sexually transmitted city??? Yeah, I guess so much for that whole 'don't bring your work home' thing...

"To touch a person... to sleep with a person... is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to

...more Did I, a brand-spankin'-new gynecologist, just read a book about a sexually transmitted city??? Yeah, I guess so much for that whole 'don't bring your work home' thing...

"To touch a person... to sleep with a person... is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many times to countries like that. I have learned how to make coffee in all their ways, how to share food, how to comfort, how to dance in the native ways."

Valente's trademark lush, ornamental, stylized, and vivid, almost paintbrush-stroke-like writing is amplified in this novel. Every sentence is surreal, dripping with imagery, soaking with color, saturated with emotions. The writing is melodic and lyrical almost to the absurd, to the point that you almost want to shake it off you and return to the world of short phrases and transparent meanings. Valente is excellent at weaving a gorgeous tapestry of language, zeroing in on small details and scenes and describing them with such poignancy that you feel almost trapped in the surreal world that she creates. It's wonderful to read it, but it's also almost exhausting, since everything is raw and on the edge, everything is exaggerated, everything is painfully exposed and amplified. The words swirl, and so do the emotions contained in them. The disjointed and staggering narration, fading in and out like in a dream, is both enchanting and oppressing, and I did love the combination of those.

The rawness of emotions and at the same time the dreamlike quality of them is in the soul of this book. Forget the plot or the characters or any semblance of a traditional story. It's not about that. It's about the pain of love and loss and loneliness. It's the story of loss and need and desperate longing. It's a story about finding a place where you belong, where you feel alive, no matter how painful and hard and absurd the journey there may seem. It's not a story about finding a happy ending; it's about both feeling alive and just dulling the pain. It's about choice and the lack of it, desire and duty, fulfillment and abandonment.

The world Valente paints with her word-strokes is weird to the extreme, surreal and dreamlike. The main character here is a dreamlike fantastical city, full of magic and life and strangeness. The city of Palimpsest, filled with living mating trains, mechanical insects, houses living as small children, rivers of clothes and milk, chimerae, and love, and death. This is not a paradise for those who manage to find it; despite it being more 'real' to them than the reality, it is still angry and dangerous and full of its own prejudices and bigotry. But it is a place for those who don't belong elsewhere - like our four characters, broken and lost and tragic and pathetic and beautiful and repulsive all at the same time; multifaceted like the city of their dreams.

"November has been taken, she knows this, and one does not argue with the one who takes. No one whose father was a librarian is ignorant of their Greek myth: when Hades hauls you into his chariot, you do not argue that he has been rude not to ask if you really wanted to go."

"This is Palimpsest, November. This is the real world. Nothing comes without pain and death."

The back cover of the book talks about a "lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger's kiss..." While I agree on the 'grotesque and beautiful' part, I want to question the erotic part.

Yes, this book is filled to the brim with sex (as expected, since sex with strangers is really the only way to get into Palimpsest - you sleep with strangers, you get a mark on your skin, a palimpsestic rash of sorts, and then you have an urge to pass it on, and so it spreads, infecting others like a true STD), but after a few initial encounters the eroticism and any semblance of enjoyable disappears and the characters are left with sex as a chore, a means to the end, casual past the point of enjoyment, undiscriminatory, dreaded by them, exhausting, unwanted, painful; sex as nothing more than a quick and undesired interlude on their way to their obsession. It is not erotic; it is exhausting. Like a true sexually transmitted disease, Palimpsest is accompanied by regret and pain. And I thought Valente handled that very well and showed it with grace and dignity while not softening the blows in any way. (However, my gynecologist self cringed quite a few times at all the unprotected sex that the majority of them were having - I mean, c'mon, is Palimpsest really worth gonorrhea or warts or unintended pregnancy or syphilis? Seriously, people, stop for a second to put that condom on. Please.)

"But this is how you do it: through the body and into the world. You fuck; you travel. That sounds crude, and you know, it usually is. It's usually ugly, and fat, and sweaty, and lonely. Luckily, it's also usually quick. But afterwards ... we find a place where we belong."

I was torn about the rating for this one. I'm a huge Valente fan, being completely won over by Deathless (one of the best books I've read this year), The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland... and Silently and Very Fast. All of those have instantly grabbed my attention and held me, enchanted, in their charms and embrace until the very last page. Palimpsest, however, was a very different experience, winning my affection very slowly, almost reluctantly, sometimes pushing me away, sometimes luring me in, but still in the end maintaining a firm grip on me - just like the surreal city of Palimpsest did on the four characters in this book.

"You need me," said Xiaohui breathlessly, pulling November over her, sliding hands under her belt to claw and knead. "You need me."
"Don’t you mean ‘I need you'?" whispered November in the girl’s ear.
"No," she sighed, arching her back, tipping her chin up, making herself easy to kiss, easy to fall into, easy to devour. "You’ll see. You’ll see."

I'm glad I did not give up on this book. While it has its flaws, while it's so heavily stylized that it almost throws you out of the story while simultaneously somehow immersing you in it, while endorsing choices and actions that I normally would very vehemently disagree with, this book did provide me with a very unique experience in one of the weirdest universes created on paper. It made me think and ache and sigh and long for things that lurk at the bottom of my murky soul. I loved the frequent mentions of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland - apparently written because of fans' requests after this book. And for all of that, I'm rounding up the 3.5-star rating to 4 stars. Valente's writing just has that something special that speaks to my soul, and I cannot resist it.

"There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love."
"Maybe the tigers are there. Maybe they're just better at hiding than trains and tenors."

(less)

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Jul 08, 2010 Jacob rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, sci-fi-fantasy-etc

July 2010

Palimpsest. What a city. Entered only in dreams, its streets and districts are marked in the flesh. Its maps appear tattooed on the skin after sex. Copulation with other people (victims? sufferers?) who bear the marks grants more access; every orgasm is a ticket to another street corner, another station. It is the strangest of venereal diseases: the city as STD.

What I want to know is, how did Catherynne M. Valente get to this before China Miéville?

It’s probably for the best. Where New C...more

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May 03, 2012 Sandra aka Sleo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook, fantasy

I have to think about this one a while. What a weird experience.

9/21 - after mulling a while, I decided on 3 stars because I both loved and hated it. I decided I had to read it almost stream of consciousness as it's written, since stopping to ponder the words detracted from the mood. At times I was annoyed, irritated, aggravated by the characters. At other times I felt an almost unbearable soaring of spirit and longing along with the characters. At times I almost stopped reading wondering why I...more

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Mar 06, 2009 Jen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: urban-fantasy, favorites, fiction, read-in-2009, re-read-in-2009

This is urban fantasy where the main character is a "fantasy" city. You can't get to Palimpsest unless you've slept with someone who's been there. You can't get to any other parts of the city unless you sleep with someone else.

It's an intoxicating read. For the continuing presence of sex in the narrative, this is not a romance. It's mentioned, even described, but it's a vehicle by which the human characters are able to find their way around a city where they seem to be meant to be.

Like The Orpha...more

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Jun 14, 2011 Jacquelynn rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Intriguing idea and beautiful prose that borders poetry. Also fascinating concept. However, I don't get much mileage from Palimpsest-there's just not much re-readability in it.

Valente's style of writing is dreamlike, floating on its own wing of metaphors and elaborate description. This is enhanced by (or exacerbated by, depending on the style of writing you enjoy) the presentation of scenes, which cuts in and out of each character's life, rather than coherently connecting them until later. By th...more

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Jun 22, 2011 Aubrey is currently reading it · review of another edition

Recommended to Aubrey by: Tor.com

Tor.com says about this book:

Palimpsest...in 60 Seconds
John Joseph Adams

Fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente told Tor.com that her new novel, Palimpsest, is an urban fantasy, but not in the way that term might imply; the eponymous Palimpsest is a sexually-transmitted city.

“It exists on the flesh of those who visit it, in a black mark that looks something like a streetmap,” Valente said in an interview. “When you sleep with someone bearing the mark, you can enter the city in dreams—but always lim...more Tor.com says about this book:

Palimpsest...in 60 Seconds
John Joseph Adams

Fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente told Tor.com that her new novel, Palimpsest, is an urban fantasy, but not in the way that term might imply; the eponymous Palimpsest is a sexually-transmitted city.

“It exists on the flesh of those who visit it, in a black mark that looks something like a streetmap,” Valente said in an interview. “When you sleep with someone bearing the mark, you can enter the city in dreams—but always limited to the part of Palimpsest that your lover carries on their skin. The novel follows four people: November, Ludovico, Oleg, and Sei, from all over the world, who become infected and then obsessed with Palimpsest, as they try to discover the nature of the place, and how to emigrate there, permanently.”

November is the most prominent of the four protagonists. “She is a young woman living in a suburb of San Francisco and working as a beekeeper,” Valente said. “She has extreme social anxiety and lives as a recluse until a single night in the city leaves her with a black mark on her face. Unable to hide what has happened to her, she begins an odyssey through the decadent clockpunk city of Palimpsest and through the real world, driving the others together. In Palimpsest, she becomes involved with Casimira the matriarch of the city and the instigator of a mysterious war in whose last battles November entangles herself.”

Writing Palimpsest was the first time Valente had written a novel set largely in the real world, rather than a secondary fantasy world. “That proved to be a terrific challenge—it’s easy to make a character interesting when they are a centaur, or a pirate,” Valente said. “Harder when it’s a lonely woman grieving for her dead father. These things are commonplace in our world, and it took a lot of time and thought to make November and her compatriots as compelling as their more colorful counterparts in Palimpsest. Palimpsest is a novel of internal worlds, and even in this life, our internal worlds are never drab.”

Palimpsest’s technology is best described as clockpunk. “[Its:] political era might be called belle epoque,” Valente said. “Casimira is the foreman of a vast factory that turns out clockwork insects by the millions—they form her army and her spies. Throughout the city, half-human, half-animal war veterans roam, mute, cared for by public works projects. The city is surreal, decadent, sensual, a conglomeration of the warring dreams and passions of its inhabitants.”

Valente said that the novel was terribly personal. “It is simultaneously a story of a fantasy world and the burning desire to get there, and of lonely people trying to find connection on the edges of society,” she said. “Being a child of the internet and various subcultures, and also someone who has been often solitary in my life, I found myself writing an almost confessional novel about the places where many people can come together and create an entirely new space, a new country, sheerly out of their desire not to be alone.”(less)

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Jul 15, 2012 Carol added it · review of another edition

Shelves: urban-fantasy, erotic

Let's be honest. The reason this book has sat on my shelf for months is because it just isn't my style. Three months later and only halfway through, and I find it time to resignedly face defeat. I love Valente's lush prose; the vivid detail that appeals to all my senses and perfectly conjures a scene. I just have a hard time with the underlying sexually transmitted disease/desire imagery, and am finding the characters a challenge to care about in their obsession.

She--or I--might have bit off a...more

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Mar 12, 2012 Meg rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites

To summarize:

Pros: Crocodile conga lines. Logophile’s dream. Rampant potential for “that’s what she said” jokes. Rampant potential for terrible puns. Barry Manilow. Euphemisms. So multicultural. Pirate frogs. Rum. Talking animals. Taking everything out of context.

Cons: Frog psychic wrapped in ragged fox fur - PETA cries, foxes die. Bugs. Gregor Samsa. Ear sex. No lols. Strange analogies. Train vagina visuals. Sexually Transmitted Tattoos. Elitism.

Usually book cover summaries are so trite and b...more

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Oct 25, 2012 Andrea rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1hills-library, z2012_read_list, 0_abandoned, fiction, myth-fairy-tale, magical-realism

Oh, Palimpsest. I still don’t think I can pronounce you correctly and this book left me exhausted, a bit confused and more than a little disturbed. Another review described Palimpsest as “clockpunk” which I misread as “cockpunk”. Honestly, I think cockpunk is fitting for this book. A dream city that haunts the days of its visitors, sexually transmitted tattoos of a maze of city streets that grant access only to what’s pictured, leading those addicted to the dark mysteries to seek out others to s...more

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Oct 06, 2011 Norman Cook rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. According to Webster's New World College Dictionary, a palimpsest is a parchment, tablet, etc. that has been written upon or inscribed two or three times, the previous text or texts having been imperfectly erased and remaining, therefore, still partly visible.

In Catherynne Valente’s novel, Palimpsest is a dream city full of fantastic, magical people, animals, and architecture. It is a city of subtle layers of shading, born out of the hopes, dreams, and fantasies of the people who live and visit...more

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Dec 28, 2009 Michael Alexander rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is REALLY interesting, and a lot smuttier than I expected. The sense of all these people with a collective obsession that pierces the normal bounds of sexual decorum, and the way that such a bond DOESN'T necessarily mean they treat each other with understanding or warmth or kindness--now THAT is an interesting set of ideas.

Separately, this first book of Valente's I've read has some fascinating language. I definitely see what people are saying when they put her in the "really out there...more

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Jul 04, 2010 Ben Babcock rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: via-io9, ebook, 2010-read, fantasy, urban-fantasy, hugo-nominee

Books create whole other worlds, and nowhere is this phenomenon more explicit than in fantasy and science fiction. More than just telling a story, great books transport the reader to a new setting, one where the rules might be different. It takes impossibilities and makes them possible. The author, then, is more than a storyteller—he or she is an architect, a craftsman executing a careful and intricate design. This is what we often mean when we speak of worldbuilding.

Depending upon how the term...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Loederkoningin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dark-and-urban-fantasy, poetry, mindblowingly-well-written, terrific-covers, dude-where-is-the-plot

"Sei pressed her cheek against the cold glass; strips of black mountains tore by under latern-blue clouds beyond her wide window. She knew a man was watching her - the way men on trains always watched her. The train car rocked gently from side to side, hushing its charges like a worried mother. She chewed on the ends of her dark blue hair. A stupid childhood habit, but Sei couldn't let it go. Her skin prickled as the man's eyes slid over her back."

The poetic prose is so beautiful that Palimpsest...more

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Mar 22, 2009 Catherine Siemann rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: book-group-books

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 31, 2011 Benjamin Thomas rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

I'm afraid you'll have to count me among those who just didn't "get" this one. That is not to say that there are no redeeming qualities here. The prose, for example. I have never encountered prose quite so elegant that it is really, in fact, poetry. Reading this novel is like reading a dream. Vivid moments connected by strange and surreal images. My experience was with the audio format which was beautifully done, the narrator having done a fine job. But I got lost so many times I really struggle...more

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Mar 15, 2009 Kim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

This book is very, very strange, and very, very wonderful---but from Valente, how could we expect anything less? It's the sort of book that begs you not to pick up another one immediately, and I fully expect myself to stumble over things and walk into walls as I try to figure out what I just read. Palimpsest is a city of living trains, animal/human hybrids, and mechanical bees; those lucky enough to visit believe they have dreamt it, but wake with strange map-like markings somewhere on their fle...more

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Jan 29, 2013 Laura rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have been very frustrated with this book. I had various bloggers I read waxing rhapsodic about it and praising it, so I thought I'd like it, and put it on my wishlist. My husband kindly got it for me for Christmas. I've been trying to finish it ever since. I started it and really did not like it at all, it seemed nonsensical, disjointed, and confusing. I thought surely if I stuck with it, it would get better. Well, it became less disjointed over time, less confusing. But no more pleasant. It a...more

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Nov 08, 2012 Ronya rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

Valente's fantastic imagery and prose made me feel, on finishing this book, that I had visited some strange and beautiful foreign country.

Potential readers may be--but shouldn't be--put off by the conceit: city as sexually transmitted disease.

Palimpsest is a city of dreams, accessible only by sleeping with someone who has a part of its map tattooed on their skin, and to move about in the city, one must sleep with more people. Oleg, November, Ludovico and Sei are as addicted to the city--filled...more

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Oct 28, 2012 Diane Kistner rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Catherynne M. Valente's "Palimpsest" is not just a fantasy--like Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" is not just a fantasy. It is not just poetic or poem-like--like Shelley's "Ozymandias" and Donne's "No Man Is An Island" are not just poems. This spirited, multi-contextual book is not just a book; the body is not just a body; the sex not just sex. In short: "Palimpsest" is holographic, shamanic, and very rich.

I found this book entrancing, bizarre, and irresistible. I made my first acquaintance...more Catherynne M. Valente's "Palimpsest" is not just a fantasy--like Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" is not just a fantasy. It is not just poetic or poem-like--like Shelley's "Ozymandias" and Donne's "No Man Is An Island" are not just poems. This spirited, multi-contextual book is not just a book; the body is not just a body; the sex not just sex. In short: "Palimpsest" is holographic, shamanic, and very rich.

I found this book entrancing, bizarre, and irresistible. I made my first acquaintance with it in its Brilliance Audio edition, performed by Aasne Vigesaa. Although a few--only a few--of the voices were not always perfectly distinguishable from each other, Vigesaa did a phenomenal job of bringing the worlds of "Palimpsest" alive. She and the author together convey the light and shadows, the intricacies and shifts, the growth, regressions, machinations, mirrors, and all the never-black/never-white swirling configurations of "Palimpsest."

The only other modern work I can think of that has had an impact on me like this one has is Hayao Miyazaki's fantasy, "Spirited Away." "Palimpsest" has some of the quality of that film as well as others like "The Matrix" where the boundaries between two very real worlds are smudged to confuse/infuse each other. Paradoxically, the reader is asked to both lose and gain control. Those unwilling, unable, or too scared to venture beyond the denotative and common will likely fail to derive from this book much of what it has to offer. Those who find the work too challenging at first would do well to seek clues in all of the definitions of the word "palimpsest." But anyone willing to be swept up in Valente's amazing work may well be plumbing its depths for quite some time. I know I will be.

Only time will tell if Catherynne M. Valente will come to be considered one of the great ones; but, as it was when I first read Faulkner forty years ago, it is clear to me that she is not just your run-of-the-mill good writer. Not only do I love this work, I now have questions I didn't know I had. What more can a reader possibly ask for?(less)

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Oct 22, 2012 Florence Caplow rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is true adult fantasy, where the "other world" of most fantasy novels is entered through sexuality. Highly surreal, fantastical, beautifully written, sometimes disturbing - I would not really call it an erotic novel, intended to be seductive, but more a novel that explores many faces of the erotic and its most mysterious aspects.

As I think about it now, though, I am almost tempted to write that the book is "anti-erotic" - there are many sexual encounters in the book, but few if any of them...more

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Oct 11, 2012 Abigail Hilton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I’m giving this book 5 stars because I think it is exactly what it’s intended to be. However, what it’s intended to be is not exactly a novel. The lush prose and fantastic imagery frequently cross the line into pure poetry. Cat Valente has a rare and astonishing gift with words. Her poetry is truly a delight to read. However, as a story, it’s pretty odd. I enjoyed _The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland_ much more. Perhaps that means that I’m too dim-witted to understand the adult version of the...more

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Jun 04, 2012 CRO rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fairytale-fantasy, goodreads-stalking, hey-theres-a-dead-girl-in-my-book, magic-realism, psychological-fiction, steamy-punk, books-read-in-2012

4 Stars

Part fairy tale, part beautiful dream, part terrible nightmare – to enter the world of Paimpsest one has to have anonymous sex with someone, usually a stranger, that bears a mark on their skin – part of the map of the city of Palimpsest. The story has an ingenious frame – it unfolds out like a map. The city is the narrator; she tells us the story of four characters, a quatro of people, on their personal journeys to find permanent residence in the city of dreams – not just the single night...more 4 Stars

Part fairy tale, part beautiful dream, part terrible nightmare – to enter the world of Paimpsest one has to have anonymous sex with someone, usually a stranger, that bears a mark on their skin – part of the map of the city of Palimpsest. The story has an ingenious frame – it unfolds out like a map. The city is the narrator; she tells us the story of four characters, a quatro of people, on their personal journeys to find permanent residence in the city of dreams – not just the single night that their furious and urgent couplings allow them.

This book is really what I wanted Perdido Street Station to be. But what was the addictive draw of this city for the characters' in this book? Meaning – in Palimisest everything has meaning and symbolism and subtext; and in our world, according to Valente, nothing has meaning except what we as humans futilely and uselessly try to scar into the surface of our existence. That is the allure of this city that in many ways is much like our own reality except for some whimsical and terrifying divergences. In Palimpsest, there is war, and hate, and greed, and unhappiness – just as in the real world. To get to the imperfect/ perfect world of Palimsest, of course, requires great sacrifice – the loss and abandonment of the very things you seek and/ or hold dear.

And there is beautiful language and imagery and dream- like intimations of sorrows and loss and joy that are too profound to be described by the proper back to front alignment of nouns and verbs – they need and require this type of dream like fairy tale of a telling. The characters are rich and textured and varied, but damn it, they open their mouths and the same sort of rhythmical poetry and imagery comes crashing out of everyone's mouths. It was long; it did go on for far too long and so totally without any sense of humor – like a bad, art school boyfriend - sooooo serious. The glee of the city in witnessing pain and cruelty was deeply disturbing from a narrator that I was led to believe was a benevolent city/saint. Discovering the narrator's delight in the torture of the main characters was chilling and pulled me out of the world of the story a couple of times.

But mostly - crawling around in someone else's dream world can be an uncomfortable affair. I can't say that the characters were actually better off leaving our reality and succumbing to Palimsest's. It smacked too much of addictive behavior and mental illness and I have spent too much time adjacent to those worlds in real life to be charmed or seduced by these sentiments in a book. The characters endured, but I didn't see them really overcoming any of their hang-ups or issues – it seemed to me more like they caved in.

In my younger years, I think I would have been thoroughly seduced by this novel – I would have been so overwhelmed that I would have been totally blind to it's few flaws - I would have let this book sweep me up and throw me around its waist. And this is a book that means to seduce – it wants to completely knock you off your feet and leave you disoriented and breathless. In my youth, I was kind of an all or nothing girl – jumping in with both feet or clinging desperately to the wall – but who isn't in their youth? I'm a trickier kind of cookie now – I'm tougher and scratchier around the edges – still have my gooey center though – which is actually a better way of being – less likely to get cracked up in a bag. So I was partially seduced by this book – see the 4 stars – the mood, the language the love, the loss, the human condition – wow. I was pulled up around its waist, but I kept that one aching, arching foot clinging to the floor – or maybe braced against a wall – anything to keep that one sliver of myself clinging to the earth – to this reality. (less)

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Mar 08, 2012 heidi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: paper, wiscon

Have you ever eaten Vosges Chocolates? (if not, I recommend you do so!) You read the bar description, and it's like... "mushroom....chocolate?" It's weird. And it's so intense and unique and you can only eat so much at a time. You really only want like, a truffle, or a square.

Cat Valente's Palimpsest is a little like that.

"To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible wor

...more Have you ever eaten Vosges Chocolates? (if not, I recommend you do so!) You read the bar description, and it's like... "mushroom....chocolate?" It's weird. And it's so intense and unique and you can only eat so much at a time. You really only want like, a truffle, or a square.

Cat Valente's Palimpsest is a little like that.

"To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language, which sounds like your own but it is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many times to countries like that. I have learned how to make coffee in all their ways, how to share food, how to comfort, how to dance in the native ways."

You can't read paragraphs like that all in a gulp. They require a little cogitating.

What Valente excels at in this book is worldbuilding. There is a plot, and it even has a beginning and a middle and an end. There are characters, and they are not unsympathetic. But they sort of exist to showcase the world, which is amazing. I love the conceit of the book, the way the world unfolds in front of you. it's a tiny bit like falling into Imajica, but, if possible, weirder. Or differently weird. A factory that creates biomechanical pests/spies. A river of clothes and fog. A church of silence. Trains that rut and mate and run wild. It is a sad and lonely book, in a lot of ways, with a lot of lost people in the world yearning for something that they cannot have, a heaven beyond their reach.

Read if: You enjoy floral prose shading to florid, you love exquisite and delicate otherworldliness. You are lonely and in search of something. You have ever sought to connect with people using your body. You like the kind of story that follows separate threads until they ultimately collide.

Skip if: Ornate language annoys you. You will be uncomfortable about sex as a means to an end, as anonymous, as sometimes a punishment. You want a strong narrative line. You read books for character development.(less)

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Dec 06, 2011 Terri Kempton rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The underlying concept - a sexually transmitted city - is fascinating. Valente applies her sharp, rich prose to this most unusual premise and she delivers a truly unique reading experience. This is a strong book, and our main four characters are charmingly complex, desperate, real, flawed, and beautiful.

Some of the world-building aspects are similar in nature to the Orphan's Tales books; I haven't decided if I find that a strength to be so identifiable, or a weakness to have repetitive ideas. B...more

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Nov 24, 2011 Tara rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jul 07, 2011 Kathryn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, hard-to-describe, sci-fi-fantasy

I've always been more impressed with the IDEA of poetry than I have with poetry itself. Beautiful verses are described in so many of the books I've read, but a lot of times when I read an actual poem it just seems too much like...work. I'm sure I could think of some exceptions (and if I would take the trouble to READ more of it then I could probably find more), but I've always thought prose was better.

To me, Catherynne Valente's books are what I've always thought poetry was SUPPOSED to be like....more

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Jan 22, 2011 Anthony rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Palimpsest is not a mindless beach read. It's not trope-filling SF, the kind of thing you can sort of let your attention wander and still know what's going on. Palimpsest the novel requires your attention the way Palimpsest the city requires the devotion of its inhabitants and visitors. You can choose, like one minor character in the book, to walk away if the work is too weird for you. Honestly, I almost did walk away. As much as I've enjoyed Ms. Valente's short stories, I was on vacation and di...more Palimpsest is not a mindless beach read. It's not trope-filling SF, the kind of thing you can sort of let your attention wander and still know what's going on. Palimpsest the novel requires your attention the way Palimpsest the city requires the devotion of its inhabitants and visitors. You can choose, like one minor character in the book, to walk away if the work is too weird for you. Honestly, I almost did walk away. As much as I've enjoyed Ms. Valente's short stories, I was on vacation and didn't want to tax my brain too hard. It was being introduced to that minor character who gives up on Palimpsest that made me decide to stick it out; I'm not one to normally give up on a book anyway (the list of books I couldn't bring myself to finish is a short list indeed), but something about a minor character wishing she'd never heard of the place the four major characters (and several other secondary ones) are willing to hurt themselves to move to made me decide to see the novel through and find out if either her sacrifice of the city or the major characters' sacrifices of parts of themselves (literally and figuratively) was the wiser, more noble choice.

I realize I have not summarized the book at all, or given you any indication of what it's about. An online friend commented that it's a book about "a sexually-transmitted city." That's the high concept: people can only find Palimpsest after they've had sex with someone who has been to Palimpsest, after which a portion of a map of the city becomes a permanent tattoo somewhere on their flesh. After that, they can only return to Palimpsest, as 'immigrants,' by having sex with other people who have been tattoed by the city. Many of the characters wonder what it takes to go from immigrant to emigre, and would gladly pay whatever price -- the city is that addictive for them.

A book can't survive on high concept alone. Well, okay, some books can and become wildly popular because they are nothing but high concept. This particular high concept wouldn't sustain itself, though, if it were just a series of orgiastic vignettes. Well, okay, again some books would, but I'd lose interest quickly. Each of the main characters needs something the city can provide, each of them is searching for something they've lost. Valente creates a main quartet of characters that is international, intergenerational, intergender and fluid intersexual -- a pretty good cross-section of society. They may start out as "types" (the disaffected Asian, the lonely young spinster, the work-obsessed husband, the hard-working immigrant) but get past the opening section and those characters take on greater depth.

What seems to put some people off the book is the intense weirdness of the city itself -- a dreamlike place where no-one is quite human, even the humans. There's a lot of weirdness to process, and again that's where the hard work comes in. The weirdness starts early and is unrelenting, although even those characters who are permanent residents of Palimpsest become deeper, almost less dream-like as the book moves on -- it's almost like moving from regular dreaming to lucid dreaming, in a way. The more I read of Palimpsest the city, the more I could picture it, the less weird the weird felt, if that makes sense.

Ultimately, I'm glad I chose to follow Oleg, Sei, November and Ludovico on their journey, rather than turning my back on Palimpsest like that minor character by drugging myself with something less dream-like. The more I read of her work, the more I feel that while Cat Valente is not an easy writer to read she is a writer worth reading.(less)

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Dec 30, 2010 Karissa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Previous to this book I had read a short story of Valente's called "A Delicate Architecture" in the Anthology "A Troll's Eye View"; I loved that story and was eager to read a full length novel by Valente. This novel was absolutely wonderful. The imagery Valente creates is phenomenal, and the premise of the story is one of the most creative I have read in some time.

This is the story of four stangers. Oleg a locksmith that lives with his dead sister, November a beekeeper who is obsessed with her b...more Previous to this book I had read a short story of Valente's called "A Delicate Architecture" in the Anthology "A Troll's Eye View"; I loved that story and was eager to read a full length novel by Valente. This novel was absolutely wonderful. The imagery Valente creates is phenomenal, and the premise of the story is one of the most creative I have read in some time.

This is the story of four stangers. Oleg a locksmith that lives with his dead sister, November a beekeeper who is obsessed with her bees, Ludovico a rare book binder who loves his books above all else, and Sei a young Japanese woman who is enraptured by trains. All four of them have something in common, they all chance to meet strangers that they connect with and sleep with. Each of the strangers bears a spider-webbed map-like mark on their body. The four protagonists in turn find themselves with a black map mark and when they dream after the encounter they find themselves in the city of Palimpsest, a city that can full-fill all your dreams. For a while and at a cost.

This was a very creative premise. Basically the only way to enter Palimpsest is to have sex with a stranger. Then when you enter Palimpsest you can only visit the parts of the city that you have previously visited or the parts that are marked on the map-like tattoo of the stranger you sleep with. So, the more people you sleep with, the more parts of the city you can visit. But you can only ever visit in dreams; the characters spend a lot of the book trying to figure out how to stay in Palimpsest permanently.

Palimpsest is a city like no-other. Palimpsest is a character in herself, and often encounters the characters on their journey through her. Each of the four characters are all a bit ironic because they each have things they obsess and love over all other things, and they are not conventional things like people; yet, the characters are continually forced to enter into interactions with other people to enter Palimpsest at all. The plot and story are intricate and mysterious, and by no means straight-forward. I found myself loving the plot and loving the fact you have to constantly think and try to figure out exactly what is going on.

If you are the type of person who likes your narratives easily understood and likes quick straight-forward writing styles I would steer clear of this book. Nothing about this writing is straight-forward. Valente weaves intricate and luscious pictures out of the most mundane things. She brings everything so alive that you can picture it glittering and sparkling in your mind. In fact everything is detailed so delicately and deliberately at times the plots spins away for a while and you are lost to the environment of the book. Much of the beginning of the book and all of the scenes that take place in Palimpsest have a very surreal and dream-like quality to them. I thought they were beautiful beyond imaging, but if I wasn't the kind of person who likes being ale to image and savor every beautiful and glinting detail of the world, I suppose it might have been irritating.

Given the premise of the story, I should mention that although sex is pivotal to the story it actually isn't really involved in much of the story. The sex scenes are very brief and not gone into in great detail or even very explicit detail. Keep in mind all these characters love something and, in general, it is not people. The sex is used a vehicle to get into Palimpsest, as such, it is dealt with in that way. So, people who don't like sex in their books, should still give this a try as it is not a huge part of the story.

I loved this story to death. The writing was absolutely enrapturing. I savored every word I read. The story was incredibly creative and very interesting to piece together. People who don't like a dream-like quality to their books and who prefer straight-forward stories should steer clear though. Will I be reading more Valente? You bet! I would like to read everything she has written.(less)

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Oct 28, 2010 Joseph Teller rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, magical-realism, dreamscape-fantasy

This is not my usual kind of reading book, as it is all about imagery, metaphor, word play and a deeper level of post modernism than I am drawn to.

But, the author is an acquaintance of mine from one of the social networks I am involved in, and find her an interesting person and her works are ones that my wife also enjoys.

I will say that who the narrator is of the tale is an interesting spin on things, and unexpected, within the story. The point of view splitting is a little difficult for me to...more

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About Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and cam...more

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Books by Catherynne M. Valente

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1)

In the Night Garden (The Orphan's Tales, #1)

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Fairyland, #2)

In the Cities of Coin and Spice (The Orphan's Tales, #2)

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Quotes from Palimpsest

“Living alone,' November whispered, 'is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.” — 38 people liked it

“To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.” — 19 people liked it

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