Michael Cisco

The San Veneficio Canon joins under one cover two short novels by Michael Cisco: his lauded 1999 debut The Divinity Student and its 2004 sequel The Golem. These are splendid deployments of the "new weird," most comparable in my reading history to Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. San Veneficio is the imaginary city where most of the story here transpires.

The book never clarifies its over-arching title, which allows the word "Canon" to be read either as an approved collection of show more scripture (the Holy Book which is the chief magical tool of the nameless Divinity Student and/or Cisco's book bearing the title) or as a minor clergyman (the Divinity Student himself). In his dream-like setting, Cisco has put into the foreground religious signifiers for places and persons: Seminary, Cathedral, Divinity Student, High Priest, etc. But the religion in question, while having some passing features and jargon of Christianity, is never specified in terms of creed or theology.

Although the book fairly thoroughly maintains a third-person omniscient narrator, there are two tiny uses of the grammatical first person in The Golem: "From horizon to horizon the only light comes from San Veneficio. I feel that spiced breath from mummified lungs once more" (130), and later--more tellingly--"her pointed* lips and nails are scarlet as the red of my binding" (182). The second of these suggests that the speaker is in fact a book; the Holy Book?
* Sic. This "pointed" would make more sense as "painted," and I suspect a typo.

The imagery of this text is kaleidoscopic. In fact, Cisco twice uses "kaleid" as a verb indicating the revolving transformation of light and vision. The Divinity Student who is--on some level, at least--the protagonist of both novels is occasionally horrifying, and becomes more than a little bit of a necromancer. The closing of The Golem embraces a type of metafiction that I identify with The Neverending Story, though certainly not in the juvenile register used by Ende! Despite that gesture at a summation, nearly any chapter of The San Veneficio Canon could stand alone as an enigmatic short story--no more enigmatic than the composite whole, really. show less

For those of you that feel a need to put this in a slot, let us call this Gothic horror surrealism. Like all good surrealism the reader is going to want to assign meaning and connection to things that are meant to be meaningless and unconnected. On the other hand there is definitely somewhat of a linear plot here. In some places it is downright funny. The body snatching scenes are derivative of the usual cliches.

What else can you say about a book where the Divinity Student is eviserated and show more stuffed full of paper in the first few pages? Our fearless protagonist, a word-finder by trade, has to distill the essence of twelve dead word finders to finish the catalog of lost words. He will scamper through a surrealist background while he tries to finish his mission.

This is the only book I have read that has a large dose of surrealism and actually became a page turner for me. The Centipede Press hardcover is also beautiful and the illustrations are marvelous. I have not read anything except a few short stories by Cisco but I will definitely be dipping into this the rest of this box set from time to time. show less

"...The disaster is that the end has already happened, and we have survived it, no one knows when or what it was, there was no *event* — over time, the world ended, and yet here we all are with no world."

The Narrator rewards careful reading. Pay it less attention than it deserves and you are bound to be tripped up, confused, and too lost to continue without going back. It is a challenge and well worth the effort. Cisco is a superb writer, able to spin a story that stimulates the imagination, steals your attention, and leaves the reader swimming in that amazing, unique prose of his. Read it or perish with the knowledge that you fail.

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