City of Saints and Madmen

The four stories contained in this book are not only astounding because of their stories, but also because of how they are written. Literary format can be as important as the contents and language of the story itself, and canderMeer's experiments have paid off. Each story is written slightly differently, but each plays with the boundaries of meta-fiction by pairing the main story with a non-fiction sounding frame that emphasizes the sense of madness-inducing reality of the city of Ambergris. I particularly enjoyed that the story of Martin Lake pairs the actual events (presumed) of his life with what an Ambergrisian art historian has interpreted about his life from his paintings. The frame story sounds like a work of non-fiction, but show more since the speaker cannot know the details of Martin Lake's actual life it becomes a fictionalized account as well, while the main story becomes a work of non-fiction because the reader must presume that this speaker (an omniscient narrator) knows what actually happenned to Martin Lake. show less

The city of Ambegris, a strange, vibrant, terrifying place or a metatextual vehicle for literary playfulness that can be as funny as they can be horrifying. And, not or. I should have said and, because this is both. Four novellas and a bunch of stories, one of the novellas a history pamphlet, one a scientific treatise and bibliography and one a glossary - well, that contains a host of hints and glimpses of stories. Ambergris is strange, Weird, in fact, full of terrible secrets and violence and intrigue and fungus. There are also squid and artists and historians and madmen and they all blend together. This collection, or fix-up, is unique, original, erudite, brilliantly written with prose by turns lush and acerbic. It's as addictive and show more delightful and filled with nightmares and unnameable terrors. i loved it. The only weak note was 'Leaving The Flesh,' one of the first of the stories written, and in some ways a precursor to the rest, it seems to merely be set in our world with a sprinkling of Ambergris set-dressing, deriving no tension from the overlap, unlike 'The Case of X,' which given the rest of the book, comes across as a lack of commitment rather than anything else. Otherwise, the whole thing is brilliant. show less

Here's the problem with this book. I really liked it. I appreciate intricate world building, I love the postmodern fantasy stuff, and I'm a sucker for any fiction with footnotes. The problem is, Ambergris still operates in a patriarchy (or at least, there's no reason to assume it doesn't) and this book fails the Bechdel test so hard it's like an F minus. I don't require that books take place in an all-women lesbian feminist utopia (would be nice to live there, but kind of boring to read about) but when so much design and creativity has been put into a book, it's an embarrassing oversight to not address gender as something that could also be rewritten.

After breakfast, necklace and map in hand, Dradin wandered into the religious quarter, known by the common moniker of Pejora's Folly after Midan Pejora, the principal early architect, to whose credit or discredit could be placed the slanted walls, the jumble of Occidental and accidental, northern and southern, baroque and pure jungle, styles. Buildings battled for breath and space like centuries-slow soldiers in brick-to-brick combat. To look into the revolving spin of a kaleidoscope while heavily intoxicated, Dradin thought, would not be half so bad.

What a marvellous book! Starting with a story about a newcomer to Ambergris who is caught up in the madness of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, the reader is gradually introduced to show more the secret undercurrents of this weirdest of cities via stories, non-fiction pamphlets on history and natural history, advertisements and the notes of a madman incarcerated in an Ambergris mental hospital. The author himself seems strangely entangled with his imaginary world. I would advise you not to read this book if you are phobic about mushrooms or mould - you could find yourself peering suspiciously into dark corners looking for signs of fungal growth.

Updated August 2015:

Eleven years after I first read it I had forgotten a lot about this book, so I decided that I would re-read it before starting Finch. But now I have discovered that there is another book between them, so I need to get hold of a copy of Shriek: An Afterword to read first.

World building always sticks in my mind better than plot, so I remembered that Ambergris seems like a colonial European city in the midst of South East Asian jungles, a bit about the squids and a lot more about the grey caps and their relationship to the city. Although I remembered the story called The Cage really well, the only other event I really remembered was what Dradin finds when he enters Hoegbotton & Sons at the end of Dradin in Love.

I love the footnotes to The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, whose author is Duncan Shriek, a waspish elderly historian who thinks writing tourist guides is beneath him: We could wish that Lacond had done more research on the subject before venturing an opinion, but then we would be bereft of his marvelous stupidity. Another high point is Madnok's pamphlet about the King Squid, which contains fantastic illustrations, although I am not totally convinced that Madnok is the expert he thinks he is.

One of the best things about City of Saints and Madmen is the way one person's madness bleeds into another's, and the Ambergris Glossary at the end of the book helps to link all the stories together by giving a different angle on people, places and events that were mentioned earlier in the book, including one very interesting entry that suggests a possible explanation for Dradin's odd behaviour in the first story. Some entries are much longer than others, with the Festival of the Freshwater Squid getting an entirely inadequate single sentence, although mentions of it elsewhere in the glossary provide a more truthful impression of its dangers (don't forget to pick up a copy of the Hoegbotton Guide to Festival Safehouses as soon as you arrive if you decide to visit Ambergris at festival time). Some of the glossary entries are very funny, as Duncan Shriek gives vent to his contempt for his fellow historians and others, and I especially liked the description of the saltwater buzzard.

So there's no change to my rating as City of Saints and Madmen remains a 5 star book for me. show less

This is the weirdest book I have ever read. It is weirder than People of Paper, in which the characters declared war on the author. It is weirder than everything China Mieville has ever cooked up.

I love weird books--or rather, I love weird books that work. Weird books that fail are depressing to read, although I do respect their attempts. Luckily, City of Saints and Madmen does work.

City of Saints and Madmen firmly plants its feet in the genre of urban fantasy, so much so that the book's narrative is that of the city of Ambergris instead of its inhabitants. The book is composed of a series of vignettes: a few novellas, a handful of short stories, a transcript, two letters, two pamphlets, an annotated bibliography, a glossary, and a show more detailed description of the various fonts used in the book. A few characters resurface in different stories, but the protagonist is always and only Ambergris itself.

And what a city Ambergris is. Unlike Mieville's gloriously grotesque New Crobuzon or Scott Lynch's Venician-esque Camorr, Ambergris has no obvious city of inspiration. My best guess is Prague, and if I'm right it's a very distant inspiration. Located along the large Moth River, constantly plagued by the damp and the ever-encroaching fungus (not to mention the indigenous mushroom-like grey caps, who've never quite forgiven the human inhabitants for massacring thousands of them upon founding the city), reliant on giant freshwater squid who may or may not be extremely intelligent, Ambergris is unique, delightful, and horrifying in turns.

The book itself alternates between nightmarishly terrifying to absolutely hilarious, often crossing between the two with little warning (never has an annotated bibliography been so funny). There's a lot of material, and it's easy to skip parts that look less interesting. Don't. Read everything.

I can't believe it took me this long to find this incredible and wholly bizarre book. Read this. Now. show less

This type of narrative is typically a difficult sell for me.

CSM contains a number of shorter stories (novellas and novelettes) which are loosely connected, and weaves a single narrative thread through them. The reason I find this sort of thing difficult is because no sooner have I become attached to one character, they are gone and time has skipped on, sometimes by centuries. I prefer a lengthier investment.

Not all the stories are equal. The first is the weakest, imo, though it picks up towards the end. Martin Lake's tale stood out to me, though it had no surprises, because the enjoyment (much of it, anyway) comes between the comparisons of what we know to be true of his experience, and what historians believe to be true of his show more influences.

Some of the passages were a little too dry, too "rpg splat book" for my preference. I skimmed any and all endnotes, glossaries, and the pages of fake academic references. A nice touch, but not really readable in story terms. If, however, you are the kind of reader who likes to extract every iota of detail, every hidden nugget or sly joke, every tiny puzzle piece of the vast mystery that is Ambergris, then all of that is certainly there for the harvesting.

I mentioned the RPG splat book feel; the sense that this is more a fantasy setting with some stories attached. It's another reason why this sort of book is generally a hard sell for me (although, I feel compelled to add, it is exactly the sort of thing my partner loves reading.) How you feel about this aspect will be completely specific to you and your tastes. If you are the sort of person who reads RPG books for fun, this is probably something of a motherload.

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Still, I've given it 5 stars, after spending a night thinking about it... so reasons why this made the 5 star list:

- I didn't enjoy every story equally, but I did enjoy every story, and each one build on previous stories to add layers, richness, metatextuality, and depth

- the metatextual elements were of course a big draw, and the novel's engagement with metafiction, surreality, horror was satisfying to me. A lot of analysis went into this book and there is a lot to get out of it, if you wish to do so.

- the writing is lovely. Maybe this goes without saying in a Vandermeer book but on the other hand, good writing is always worth singing praises for.

- the humor really appealed to me. I've highlighted one particular chapter where the insulting tone of the narrator had me laughing out loud.

- it's just so *complete* as a book. The worldbuilding is breathtaking, the scale and depth and layers to it. As someone who is a weak, half-assed worldbuilder, I was duly impressed, and (I hope) I learned a lot from this read. Ambergris feels very real, both present and distant, both fantastical and believable. That in itself is a lovely achievement

- It kept me very interested and engaged despite, as I said before, this not being quiiite the type of book I usually enjoy. Nice to push the boundaries, of course. show less

I would love to say this novel defies description, but it doesn't. :) In fact, thanks to the existence of a number of really quite fabulous works that came after it, some from VanderMeer's own hand, we can now properly place this work in its proper context.

New Weird.

Yeah, yeah, but WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

In this case? I'd call this a tightly interwoven series of stories and faux academic papers surrounding the fictional city of Abergris. Expect strange mushrooms that range from hallucinogenic to graphically horrific to a high-grade fever dream of a Lovecraftian occultist.

And let's not forget the squids. Or the squid cults. Or how we have a large portion of the most respected library in Ambergris devoted to books on the squids that range show more from naturalists to fairy tales to squid cults to conspiracy theories hinting that some of the most troublesome parts of a few popular squid plays were, in fact, written by a certain cephalopod IN HIS OWN INK.

Sound strange? It isn't. Not really. Each tale is a low-grade fever dream couched heavily in the normal, the regular, the banal. Things only get odd at a slow rate, kinda like being boiled alive and not understanding this fact until it is far too late. Of course, that makes us lobsters. Not squid. My metaphor breaks down.

I was honestly driven to real anxiousness and amorphous horror by many of these related tales. Much like his more well-known works in Area X and Borne, he has a wonderful command of the scientific method, an evocative sense of awe, and a well-developed manner of timing his prose to pack a heavy horror punch.

For those of you who are familiar with the general modern fantasy (often SF) field, the closest writers to this wonderful novel would happen to be Christopher Priest's Dream Archipelago sequence. Alan Moore's Jerusalem is also wonderfully close to it. But I won't fail to add, to a lesser degree, China Mieville. :)

New Weird is a genre-bender in all senses, adding heavy fake academics, amazing depth, horror sensibilities, passion, and a dose of THINGS THAT CAN'T BE RIGHT. But are, of course, in the tale. Most of the time, these aspects flabbergast the characters as much as it does us. It's charming and endlessly diverting. :)

Do I recommend?

Oh, yes. For anyone who likes a solid challenge and doesn't mind having their minds blown. Absolutely. :) show less