18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delicious Weirdness, January 30, 2004
This review is from: Calenture (Paperback)
Oh, weirdness incarnate! I love this woman! Sheesh... and I thought Wraeththu was an experience!
Calenture is like nothing else and like a whole lot of things: an exotic dream, a drugged-up trip, a philosopher's dissertation in the key of "I think, therefore I am," a rabbit hole complete with its Alice, times three. It's existential, it's entertaining, it's just plain odd. Wonderful. And it has the greatest conclusion I've ever read. It's both absolutely predictable and absolutely unexpected and entirely satisfying. It brings everything into focus like the snap of Storm's magical fingers.
The plot... Well, there's a man named Casmeer, who lives in a city in the mountains, far from any other settlements, if such exist. It's sort of an island of civilization. The civilization has a little problem: every person in the city has crystallized - turned into crystal statues. All except Casmeer, who's been living all alone for over four hundred years, protecting what remains of the others from being dismembered by bird-monkeys that like shiny things.
Casmeer's been writing a history of the city and its people. He has been entertaining himself in this fashion, but he is starting to feel the weight of the years and wants to try something new. He starts writing a fiction, trying to guess at what life is like elsewhere.
There is a flatland surrounded by the mountains. The flatlands are inhabited by floating, crawling, flying cities. Each city is its own world, dramatically weird. Casmeer invents two characters, Ays and Finnigin, and sends them on rather pointless journeys to find mysterious somethings. A mysterious stranger follows them and helps them along - or not. The stranger is Casmeer's fictional representation of himself, but then so are Ays and Finnigin.
The story alternates between Casmeer's diary and the fictional stories of Ays and Finnigin. The lines between reality and creativity blur. A collection of the most ridiculously random events accumulates with no point in sight and the more you read, the more you see some weird sort of sense in it all. You know, for a fact, that it's all going somewhere. It's like the proverbial big picture floating just beyond your range of vision. Then - BOOM! A conclusion that brings things together in the most mind-boggling way. It's amazing!
This book is a journey and an experience and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone. It would be cruel to deprive yourself of this. It's too unique.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Formulaic fantasy, this is not, November 19, 2002
This review is from: Calenture (Paperback)
Stock up the larder before you read this book. Shut off the phone. Seriously---you're going to need some quiet time for this.
This is not to say that I didn't like Storm Constantine's "Calenture." I actually thought it was brilliant, and fascinating. But boy, was it a hard read.
This is because a) it's a story within a story that goes back out to the external story, b) it takes place in a world that might be an hallucination, and c) it's just plain weird.
There are two stories in this book. The first is the very simple one of a man named Casmeer, who is basically the last man alive in his neck of the woods. Said neck of the woods is a fantastic city called Thermidore, which was once the pinnacle of civilization. At the height of that civilization, however, the alchemists of the city came up with what they believed to be the formula for an immortality serum. Whoops---turns out that after 50 years or so, people who have consumed this serum begin to slowly turn into crystal statues. Several hundred years later, only Casmeer is left. He doesn't know why, but he seems to be the only person on whom the serum actually worked the way it was supposed to. He leads a lonely life, tending the empty city and trying to protect the statues of his fellow citizens from strange creatures called plumosites who magpie-ishly try to steal bits of the shiny statues.
One day, however, he comes up with a new way to pass the time. He starts by wondering what happens to the shining pieces of the statues when the plumosites take them away. From this kernel of an idea, he decides to write a novel set in a world where all cities are mobile, either creeping along on crawlers or strange mechanisms, or even flying through the air. A mysterious race of gypsy-like people called terranauts guides the movement of the cities by laying down trails of---gasp---magical shiny stones, which seem to be oddly alive...
Surprise! This is the second story in the book, which takes up the bulk of the volume. Casmeer's story is relegated to footnotes at the end of each chapter, from here on. The second story focuses on two characters, Ays and Finnigin.
Ays is a beautiful, proud young priest/mercy killer (yes, mercy killer; that's his job) who lives in a flying city called Min. He's quite content with his life until one day one of his patients asks him a number of disturbing questions that cause him to wonder about his past and identity in ways he never has before. Where did he come from? Who was his mother? Unable to regain the serenity he once enjoyed, he decides to leave Min, to discover his true origins.
Meanwhile, the story also follows Finnigin, a young terranaut. All terranauts must leave their home-tribe and go on a journey to prove their adulthood, so Finnigin sets out to do this, hoping to discover the secret of the shiny stones while he's at it.
The story follows each young man's adventures as they travel through this world---first separately, and then together. Each of the cities is its own bizarre little fantasy-realm: in one, the citizens all think of themselves as actors, and they live carefully-scripted lives and rate one another on their performances (children are kept in an orphanage until they grow old enough to learn their lines). In another city, strangers are kept in beautiful towers and treated like kings for sixty days, then dumped into a river with a gold weight tied to their feet. All of the cities are fascinating in some way, and some have more shadows than others. There are other places, too, that the travelers visit---a flying train that travels from city to city, bearing passengers who (mostly) never leave; a rare stationary city, which seems to be the healthiest place in this world (but most of its citizens are nearly blind); a village that exists on the back of a giant trundling insect.
This is fascinating stuff---perhaps most fascinating when the lines between Casmeer's real life and the story he's writing begin to blur together, for both Casmeer and the reader. Is Casmeer's story just a story, or has he somehow tapped into a real (maybe parallel) world? Is the mysterious figure that Ays and Finigin encounter throughout the book Casmeer, in some kind of strange allegorical form? Is Casmeer himself real? Deep questions, which sometimes aren't given specific answers.
So once again, Storm Constantine has proven her ability to write her butt off. She's got a stunning imagination and it really shows here; the complex world-building that went into Wraeththu is taken even further in this masterpiece. This is a world which contains multiple smaller worlds---each of which could be the focus of a single fantasy novel. This is a world where the sane keep moving, and only the insane stand still---but since the sane never leave their cities, and the insane do, who's moving and who's really stationary? Contradictions like this are everywhere in the novel, and so intricately-connected and perfectly-plausible that... that... I'm just in awe. =)
So this one's a definite recommend, but only for people who are prepared to put some effort into it. It's not formulaic fantasy, or light reading. This book requires thought and immersion---but your efforts will be rewarded. =)
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy it!, July 12, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Calenture (Paperback)
Storm Constantine's 'Calenture' must be the most underrated (or should that be overlooked?) fantasy novel of the last decade. I'm thrilled it has been republished, and hope it remains in print for years to come. Gushing finished, it's time to get pedantic and annoying. Stark House Press's presentation of this gem is very disappointing: small, slightly faded-looking print which makes the pages look almost Xeroxed; the original frontispiece (a line drawing of a flying city) was omitted; woeful typesetting-the font does not lend itself to the tone of the book all, and the indentation on each paragraph is unusually wide and distracting. And, of course, it's one of those horrid large format paperbacks (economical, I guess, which is understandable). For me, having cherished the original for so many years, such sloppy presentation is a travesty. New 'Calenture' readers probably won't care about such tripe as this, and would rightly think I need to get a life, but I would urge those who have purchased this copy seek out a first edition or first edition paperback (Headline, 1994), both of which I believe are available through Constantine's back catalogue at Immanion Press via www.stormconstantine.com, for the true 'Calenture' experience!
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