City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Jan 24, 2009 Brad rated it it was amazing

Shelves: speculative, fantasy, weird, to-read-again

*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.*

Dradin, In Love
As Dradin experiences the rain, I am straining with the brightness of our first sunny day reflecting off the silky pages of City of Saints and Madmen, and I am struck by the sensuality of the experience a mere forty pages into VanderMeer’s opus. The weight of the book is comfortable in my ...more

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Mar 17, 2009 Sandi rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2009, fantasy

GoodReads definition of two stars is "it was ok". That pretty much sums up what I thought of "City of Saints and Madmen" by Jeff VanderMeer. Some of the stories were really good, like "The Cage", "The Transformation of Martin Lake" and "The Strange Case of X". If all the stories had been that caliber, I might have given this book four stars. Unfortunately, VanderMeer gets too into his conceit of the book being the story of the city of Ambergris. The section that was an early history of Ambergris ...more

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Mar 02, 2008 Brooke rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy, short-story-collections, 2009

I'm struggling with how to think about this book. 3 stars is inadequate to express how I felt about many of the individual stories contained in the collection. By themselves, they were very good - atmospheric, creepy, well-written, well-imagined, etc.

As a whole however, I'm not sure it worked for me. It's supposed to be a collection of stories about the city of Ambergris. It's a city filled with mysterious mushroom people, artists, a festival that involves squids and slaughter, and mystery. Abou ...more

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Mar 19, 2009 Nicky rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative-fiction, fantasy

Confession: I didn't actually read all of the appendix of this. I intend to finish it some day, but it's not the kind of book I feel like I can sit down and just blitz on through. The... bittiness annoys me: I do like short stories/novellas, but this isn't the easiest collection to read.

The comparisons between Perdido Street Station and this book are obvious. I felt the cities were characters in both books -- more clearly so in this book, where there's no single recurring, central character. It' Confession: I didn't actually read all of the appendix of this. I intend to finish it some day, but it's not the kind of book I feel like I can sit down and just blitz on through. The... bittiness annoys me: I do like short stories/novellas, but this isn't the easiest collection to read.

The comparisons between Perdido Street Station and this book are obvious. I felt the cities were characters in both books -- more clearly so in this book, where there's no single recurring, central character. It's an interesting collection of stories with all kinds of different tones and styles and genres, even, all centred around the fictional city of Ambergris. The writing and descriptions are quite rich, and you build up a very clear mental image of this city.

Ignoring the appendix, there are four stories:

Dradin, In Love -- This one was richest in very visual descriptions of the city. I kind of felt overwhelmed, a bit thrown in at the deep end, but I did like the descriptions. It was also the most straightforward short story -- not masquerading as anything else. The ending was weird, and clever, but also kind of predictable.

The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris -- This was slightly drier, masquerading as a sort of history pamphlet. The footnotes made me laugh, but it was kind of irritating to go back and forth between text and footnotes. The style was clever, but the story wasn't as enjoyable as the first one.

The Transformation of Martin Lake -- This combined story-telling with a sort of... art criticism thing. Again, clever, and more interesting because there was also normal short story narrative. It kind of discusses misinterpretations of art and rolls its metaphorical eyes at people who pretend they understand author intent through psychoanalysing them.

The Strange Case of X -- At this point it felt like it was "too clever by half". Which is how I generally feel about authors appearing in their texts, so perhaps that isn't an unexpected reaction from me. It was kind of obvious to me, and yeah, it's a clever story device but it also wasn't that surprising. Not so much world-building or anything, just pure "lookit my clever plot device, look!".

Appendix -- Stuff related to the previous story. Some of it is interesting, some of it not, for me. ...more

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