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City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1)

Jeff VanderMeer

Start date: October 24, 2015

Discussion: CITY OF SAINTS & MADMEN

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CITY OF SAINTS & MADMEN

Intertextual references in COSAM
By Traveller · 17 posts · 35 views

last updated Nov 23, 2015 08:51AM

The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris
By Traveller · 3 posts · 24 views

last updated Nov 17, 2015 08:41AM

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What Members Thought

Feb 03, 2010 Traveller rated it it was amazing

Shelves: dark, new-weird-bizarro, four-and-a-half-stars, alternate-world, favorites, macabre, metafiction, urban-fantasy

Jeff VanderMeer is a self-proclaimed "New-Weird" writer.

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.
A more modern example of another New-Weird author, would be China Miéville.

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 ...more

72 likes · Like · see review

Jan 24, 2009 Brad rated it it was amazing

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

*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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Sep 01, 2008 David Katzman rated it really liked it

If Proust had been a hella Dungeon Master and then dropped all the monsters and sword play…you might end up with something like City of Saints and Madmen.

For several years now, I’ve almost exclusively read books as research for my second novel. With few exceptions (when the books were short), I’ve been committed to that focus religiously. (As religiously as an atheist-buddhist-jew can be.) Not all the books I’ve read were chosen for concrete research, per se—such as, “I’ve invented a character w If Proust had been a hella Dungeon Master and then dropped all the monsters and sword play…you might end up with something like City of Saints and Madmen.

For several years now, I’ve almost exclusively read books as research for my second novel. With few exceptions (when the books were short), I’ve been committed to that focus religiously. (As religiously as an atheist-buddhist-jew can be.) Not all the books I’ve read were chosen for concrete research, per se—such as, “I’ve invented a character who survived a botched lobotomy so I’m going to read books by Ann Coulter”—but sometimes I choose books to get a taste of stylistic influences that might be complementary. In this case, City of Saints and Madmen gave me the impression of a sensuous style and fantastical weirdness. Tastes great, more filling.

I was right. It’s a pretty sweet book, wonderfully written in most ways, yet it still let me down as a whole for two particular reasons that are my own bias. First to the good: As I implied by the Proust reference, his writing ability is outstanding. His sentences never achieve the labyrinthine subliminity of Proust, but he certainly has an impressive and natural command of language, grammar and sentence structure that aspires to the Proustian. The quality is erudite, rich and evocative. He also switches personas adeptly from one first-person narrator to another.

This book is a fantasy novel, of a sort, but with none of the standard trapping of the genre. It’s features a quite convincing parallel earth much like our own set roughly in a Victorian era in a city of chaos, religion, violence and commerce. But Vandermeer tweaks and twists just a few elements of our reality to spawn a déjà-vu paradigm—it’s like our world…and yet not. A few elements that push it into the fantasy realm include: a race of mushroom-eaters who live underground, speak an unknown language, and may have disappeared an entire city of people in one single day without leaving a trace; a tremendous variety of giant and possibly intelligent squid; some odd animal life; very aggressive fungi; and the potential to travel between our reality and the one of Ambergris, the city that this book centers around.

Despite the lack of elves, beholders, magic swords, trolls, frost giants and 20-sided dice, a Dungeon-Master personality comes through for me via the absolutely meticulous history and detail that make up Vandermeer’s world of Ambergris. I was both a D&D player and Dungeon Master, and I recall spending days on end drawing convoluted maps and shaping entire continents, inventing names of rivers, towns, countries, kings and queens, cities and, of course, dungeons. Mapping out every square inch, filling it with monsters and allies, traps and treasure. Ambergris is much the same. Vandermeer works quite hard to give the impression (and successfully at that) that he is channeling an alternate reality through this novel. In fact, one story within COSAM features a character in a madhouse who claims to be a writer from Chicago writing about a city called Ambergris. (view spoiler)

Anywho, this brings me to my first minor bias against this book. Several of the stories herein end too patly. Like the one I just described. It’s the twist ending, the clever payoff, the surprise you didn’t see coming (or did, because it wasn’t quite that well disguised.) Yes, there is a great deal of ambiguity, mystery and unknown in COSAM, but there are also a few too many stories that tie up neatly like a riddle rather than like reality. Nothing is ever so tidy. So that bothered me.

And the second point that I didn’t like—that I’ve vaguely alluded to previously—is that this book is in fact a collection of short novellas rather than a single novel. I am just not a fan of short stories; they never have the meat to satisfy me. This book is close to being the exception to the rule, but I would have preferred an interweaving long narrative about Ambergris. Instead, COSAM presents a somewhat chaotic (like the city itself) series of varied scenarios featuring Ambergris. The first, and longest, story features a missionary just returned to Ambergris from the jungle where he failed at his mission. He is suffering a sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome and jungle poisoning. The second novella is a detailed telling of the history of Ambergris (as best as it can be known) from the perspective of a crotchety old historian who doubts he really knows what happened. The third features the tale of a mediocre artist in Ambergris invited to a “beheading” that leaves him forever altered. The fourth novella is the aforementioned writer in the psyche-ward. Ps. The creative impulse and writing itself are two of the major themes explored herein.

The book concludes with an Appendix almost as long as all the previous novellas that features twelve different sections ranging from an amateur squidologists research on squids to a glossary of Ambergrisian people, places and things. All written from unique points of view. Although I admire and appreciate the connected quality of these stories, it’s not what I generally seek out. (And if you don’t think the glossary was written by someone who was once a personal friend of E. Gary Gygax, then you don’t know your saving throw from your +2 long sword.)

Despite my personal qualms, I do highly recommend this work. The writing is outstanding and the tone ranges from disturbing to hilarious and everything in between. Weird and freakish. Flip through it and see what you think. Definitely recommended for fans of literary speculative fiction (as they say.)
...more

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Sep 05, 2015 Magdelanye rated it it was ok

this may be just a case of poor timing, but as many times as I picked this up, I found no patience, no curiosity, no resonance in the skillfully arranged content. Ambergris simply failed to lure me in, Even the one story I read, which was quite clever, I had to force my way through the florid prose.
I do sense some genius at work here, I can comprehend how my fellows on the path have found it praiseworthy, but I closed the pages for now unwilling to inhabit the dank atmosphere.
must remember this ...more

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