A Stranger in Olondria

Beautifully written, exquisitely crafted, a tale of books and reading, and the wisdom that lies somewhere between the written word and lived experience. A callow young islander travels to a rich and distant empire, his head filled with vibrant visions thanks to the book of his exile tutor. Immersing himself in this new world, he becomes haunted by an angel, the ghost of a sick girl he met briefly on his voyage. Tormented by her visitations, he becomes part of a power struggle between religious factions that are slowly leading to civil war.

Vivid descriptions, a lush atmosphere and a rich and varied world brought to life in the same manner that so enchants our young protagonist - a brilliant and gorgeous and profound book.

The lush description builds up a setting that is rather hodgepodge--at first, given the opening, I thought Olondria would be an alternative India or other South Asian setting, but in the end there's bits of everywhere, people wear monocles and skullcaps, sit in parlors and cafes bearing swaths of silk in un-Victorian profusion, eat pears poached in wine and drink chocolate (which to my mind either implies a Columbian Exchange in this alternate universe or just proves there is no North American analogue). This is actually the kind of creatively anachronistic, stylishly rich worldbuilding I love, and it excuses the level of description--when nothing can be taken for granted, a writer should tell the readers enough details to get by. One show more particular set of details I loved: Jevick frequently quotes other writers from the world of Olondria, which reminded me of more classic writers and their tradition of allusions. It's a great way to immediately add depth to the text, and I should note that Samatar takes a gamble by using actual excerpts from the fictional books, and successfully pulls them off.

As a ghost story, its mood is more melancholy than horrific. I want to compare it to The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, for the rich tour of the world with a quest at the heart of it (a quest that starts off personal and turns out to have stakes on a much greater scale). However, there is not a hint of H.P. Lovecraft's virulent racism (hopefully this is clear from both the cover and the fact that the book was at WisCon; it lands on the opposite end of the racefail-o-meter). And books are the emotional touchstone instead of cats. You can quote me on that.

And ultimately, it is a story about reading. Not in a pat moral sense--it's not The Reading Rainbow for grownups (not that anything is wrong with Reading Rainbow!). But with that theme in mind...well, as I said, I'm sure this story benefits from rereading. To do that, you need to read it the first time around. And you should.

A longer version of this review appears at Story Addict . show less

This is a hard book to review. On just the prose itself, it's a 4 or 5 stars. This book is gorgeous. The language is lovely and musical. Plot wise, it was again, high - there was a good premise. For actual execution, however, probably a 2. Gorgeous language, unfortunately, just does not make up for very slow and uneven pacing.

The first half of the book was Jevick learning about Olondria, the land of books and writing, and then actually going there himself after his father's death. He spends much of his time as a loafer and playboy, enjoying food, books, and women. This section was arguably the slowest portion of the book. Things pick up slightly with the appearance of Jissavet's ghost, though it isn't until Jevick falls in with the show more Priestess of Avalei that I started really getting into the story.

Another thing that kept bugging me was that I did not like either Jevick or Jissavet. Jevick, despite being the protagonist, did not exhibit much agency and was instead solely an agent of the plot. He largely allowed others to determine his fate and it wasn't until toward the end of the story that he made decisions for himself, which to the credit of the development of the character, were selfless. Jissavet was a brat, and I think she was fully aware of that. She acknowledges she had no respect or understanding for her mother and thought herself above her mother. Whether that was just an aspect of her personality or a manifestation of her kyitna was a bit unclear, but either way, I had very little sympathy for her in life or in death, where she essentially bullied Jevick to get her way.

At the end, I finally understood this was a book about the power of books and writing and learning.

A Stranger in Olondria is not written in an easy-to-read manner, deliberately, I think. It mimics some of the classics of previous generations, with rambling prose that is hard to follow for someone (read: me) accustomed the straight-forwardness of contemporary publishing. Which makes me realize it's been a very long time since I sat down with Lord Dunsany or Tolkien and gotten immersed in the prose, focusing on the language rather than the plot. The speculative fiction genre seems to have forgotten its roots, and Sofia Samatar appears to be trying to revitalize a love and appreciation for language in the genre. show less

A Stranger in Olondria is the most lyrical, engrossing novel I've read in quite a while.

Jevick inherits his father's pepper estate and, for the first time, makes the annual journey to the pepper market of cosmopolitan Olondria. Jevick has never left his rural island home, but he has grown up immersed in the literature of Olondria—his tutor is an exiled Olondrian scholar, and Jevick is the first of his people to become literate.

The story that follows is a picaresque adventure, a romance, a ghost story, a postcolonial novel, and a profound meditation on the transformative, ambivalent power of stories. Samatar excels stylistically—her dense, lush descriptions remind me both of Salman Rushdie and of lyrical modernist poets like H.D. show more It's her characters, however, that make this a really exceptional novel and kept me reading—they are the real thing, the "Mrs. Brown" of the Le Guin essay, and their voices stayed with me after I finished the book.

I'd love to discuss this book in a group setting—there are a lot of Big Ideas here, some of which blindsided me when they cropped up near the end. Samatar is dealing with the intersections between cultures and ways of life, a topic fantasy and science fiction is so good at addressing, and it's challenging material. (Sample book club questions: Do stories save us or merely haunt us? Can we ever truly know another culture or another person, or do we just tell stories to ourselves?)

Finally, I really, really like that this is a fantasy novel and not magical realism set in our world. If you have ever wished for some productive cross-pollination between postcolonial literature and speculative fiction (or wished you were smart enough to wish for such a thing), pick up this book. show less

This is the sort of book that sits with you and forgets to leave, and at some point you turn around from whatever you're doing and realize you're still thinking about it.

It's a ruminative story, with a slowly building story. Big stuff happens, but it unspools rather than explodes, and the protagonist, Jevick, doesn't carry the day and save the kingdom: he is a heartbeat in a grander political and religious conflict. I'd say A Stranger in Olondria is demonstrative of the ongoing erosion between the barriers of genre (which I'm defining right now by pulp conventions, rapid plot, etc) and literary (which I'm defining as prose- and character-motivated) work. The heart of the story is the main character's personal transformation.

Also, there show more are ghosts and lyric poetry. Unlike the poetry in nearly any other novel I've read, it's beautiful and moves the story. show less

Hard to describe this book. It is dense but not because it is in love with its own prose. It is full of setting but not in a self-conscious or self-indulgent way. It has a fully realized new world, but it's not precious--it feels real, with how characters react to and act in the landscape and the history and politics and culture. The plot does not go in a predictable direction but feels inevitable. There are action-filled scenes but is is also a story of inner life. It carries its own spell.

This is a very particular kind of fantasy novel, as much a literary (filled with albeit imaginary books) novel as it is a deep travelogue between two richly imagined fantasy lands.

At first, I was put off by the oh so lengthy passages of works and legends and overlong paragraphs, but like a lot of great fiction, it takes a learning curve and it often takes a bit of patience. Once I fell into the actual story rather than the many allusions made of whole cloth from a new mythology both familiar to us and strange, it became much easier to read.

The fact is: there's an awful lot to love in this novel as long as you're a lover of myths, stories within stories within stories, and don't mind being thrown into the mind of a heavy reader and show more eventually the mind of a heavy writer that is literally spurned on to write by the demonic exhortations of a ghost he eventually learns to love.

And don't think this is an entirely dry novel, either, because it eventually has some startling surprises and import for the land he's visiting. It's hard being a holy man, especially if you're a tourist, but it shouldn't be any kind of surprise that tourists will eventually return home and bring along tales and change.

It's a very satisfying novel if you can get through it, but be forewarned, it's dense with words and myth. It's a true work of the imagination, drilling deep and deeper and deeper into the two worlds that had been written.

Take your time, too. You'll be glad you did. :) show less