Customer Reviews

City of Saints and Madmen

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

'The City of Saints and Madmen' is easily my favorite collection of 2001. Comprised of four stories, each more deliciously exotic and fascinating than the one before, this attractively priced trade paperback is sure to entrance all readers willing to immerse themselves in VanderMeer's brilliantly conceived world.

VanderMeer's Ambergris is easily the most lavish and enticing fantastic world that I've yet to encounter. Articulating the brilliance of this book would require writing skills on a par with VanderMeer himself. I can only point to the book and insist that it is excellent. Truly excellent.

Taken by themselves, the stories are small gems...but when looked at as a whole, as part of the wonderful Ambergrisian tapestry, they become more than the sum of their parts. I anguished with the title character in 'Dradin in Love' as he realizes that his passionate longing for a mysterious woman is unlikely to be consummated. The fascinating history of Ambergris as told in 'The Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris by Duncan Shriek' is surely one of the most complete histories of a fictional world ever conceived. The World Fantasy Award Winning 'The Transformation of Martin Lake' tells the amazing story of a humble artist who is transformed into a master through a harrowing and bizarre experience. Finally, 'The Strange Case of X' blurs the lines between fantasy and reality as an author whose life appears analogous to VanderMeer's undergoes rigorous questioning concerning the substance of reality.

Under VanderMeer's watchful eye, Ambergris is a thriving and exotic landscape. I devoured this collection in a matter of hours. Hungry for more I jumped onto the internet and searched out more VanderMeer. Ambergris is so fascinating and richly exotic that I could see VanderMeer writing about its Living Saints and Graycaps for decades without running out of stories to tell.

Immerse yourself in Ambergris. The land is hauntingly beautiful and terrifyingly real. I can see myself re-reading this brilliant collection several times a year. This masterful collection belongs on the bookshelf of every fan of speculative fiction. I'm eagerly looking forward to the Deluxe edition which supposedly contains 30,000 more words about this wonderful place and is supposed to be released Real Soon Now.

This volume, exciting and beautiful, is easily one of my all-time favorite books. Try it yourself. You won't be disappointed. Highly Recommended.

Do you love books? I mean, really love them? Then this is a book that should be on your shelf. The writing is top-notch. Modernist fantasy as powerful as anything from Tim Powers, Charles de Lint, or China Mieville. The best realized fictional world since Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.
In addition, the book is gorgeous! It is filled with wonderful illustrations, great design, and interesting typography.
What else do you get? How about a story on the dust jacket? How about a story written in code? Cool stuff.
In short, stunning.
Did I mention this is a print-on-demand title? This means the book is printed as it's ordered (well, maybe not every time, maybe every 50 or so) but it's a totally different printing process than standard books. No plates. That makes the layout of the book staggering!
Did I mention that the writing is amazing?
Buy this book. Buy several copies of this book and give it to friends.
Don't miss out.

If you like E.A.Poe, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake, the Jack Vance of Dying Earth, the Michael Moorcock of Gloriana and Dancers at the End of Time, the M.John Harrison of In Viriconium, the J.G.Ballard of Vermilion Sands -- you'll be able to add this to your shelf of favorites for reading and re-reading. Atmospheric, dreamlike, intelligent. This is one of the very best of the literary fantasy writers. VanderMeer's rep. has been growing apace and this is a great introduction to his strange world of Ambergris. A fine, original work.

Jeff Vandermeer's "City of Saints and Madmen" is sort of like finding a chest full of gold in a house fire: you've got to be quick to filch out the treasure in this awkward collection of often gripping, typically ghoulish little tales desperately searching for some order among the chaos---much like the boys and girls of Ambergris, the teeming city in which all this dastardly stuff takes place.

That's too bad, because half-hidden beneath this obtuse, strangely skeletal, self-satisfied wreck of a book are five juicy little stories, nuggets of unmitigated grue and wonder that Vandermeer has clearly invested his mind and imagination and soul. The stories suggest a writer with tremendous promise and some magic in his keyboard.

I first encountered the noxious "The Cage" in an obscure horror anthology. It is a shivery little morsel of pure dread concerning the fate of a stout descendant of the auspicious Hoegbotton clan. But it's what the story doesn't say---the dark things it hints at---fungus! dwarves! Truffidian priests!---that intrigued me, and led me, at long last, to Ambergris.

Try "The Cage": you'll like it. Upon my first reading, I found wicked, brimming with subversive, infectious evil. I wanted more.

Alas, Vandermeer never fashions a crown for his crown jewels. Expect an Ambergris any fuller or richer than that glimpsed in the five main short tales? Expect to be disappointed.

But those short gems do gleam in the darkness, and for them Vandermeer merits a chance. I have written already of "The Cage". "The Transformation of Martin Lake", about the strange life and stranger death of the prolific and powerful Ambergrisian composer Voss Bender, reminded me quite a bit of Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut": it is all about secret assignations, and night-haunted fog-shrouded alleyways, and dead men telling no tales.

Then there is there is the apocalyptic "Dradin in Love", which is all about madness and obsession and disease and death, and the short and deadly "Learning to Leave the Flesh". The moral of both tales, if there is one, seems to be to avoid talking to strange dwarves with tattoos. The nasty "In the Hours After Death" brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase "dead on his feet". All of them are masterpieces of excellent storytelling: all of them leave the reader begging for more. All reek of ancient horror, of all too finite and feeble human lives, and of melancholy and madness, in equal doses.

Why couldn't Vandermeer have worked this kind of magic over the course of a book, in which these stories really do interweave and suggest something larger---rather than merely cleverly self-referencing?

The book also suffers from preciousness in presentation: like most collages, the book uses physical gimmicks as an alternative to cohesive storytelling. Alexandre Dumas used the power of his words alone to tell the tale. J.R.R. Tolkien aided his story merely with a map.

Vandermeer, by contrast, needs the aid, presumably, of a full-time graphics SWAT team: "City" uses dozens of fonts and typesets, encryption, baroque chapter heads, all manner of squidy illustrations. This is not storytelling, it's graphic design.

"The Early History of the City of Ambergris" is a prime example of padding which could have served its purpose of unifying the five tales---but instead makes a point of using a war-fleet of footnotes and teensy tinsey marginalia to assault the reader's eyeballs. Ugh. And please, don't get me started on "The Strange Case of X", in which the author unforgivably inserts himself into his own creation like some sci-fi version of Woody Allen.

Worse, Ambergris itself is largely a clone of Byzantium (modern day Istanbul): a chaotic pastiche transplanted out of space and time to the "River Moth", cobbled together of place-names and battle-sites and historical figures Vandermeer has intellectually grave-robbed from the tomb of Byzantine Imperial history. When Conan creator Robert E. Howard was creating his absorbing, living, breathing *world* of Hyperborea and cobbled together or corrupted the names of actual kings and kingdoms of antiquity, he was called a hack. In our less demanding age, Vandermeer does this and is called "brilliant".

Recommended, though, if only for these wondrous little short nuggets of terror and melancholy nearly buried in the offal of the overall book. The little glimpses we see of an Ambergris---the fungal growths, the constant patter of rain on Albumuth Boulevard, the grisly and carnal orgies that accompany the Greater Festival of the Freshwater Squid each year, the menacing Grey Caps---all of these things make me wish Vandermeer had been more ambitious, and truly wrestled with his creation to give us a living, breathing city.

Beautiful and lush imagery highlight this collection; sure to be one of th best genre books of 2002. This edition of the VanderMeer collection contains each of the four novellas from the 2001 paperback (including the World Fantasy Award winning 'The Transformation of Martin Lake') and augments them with two major new novellas and assorted other Ambergris material, including an expanded Ambergris glossary.

The collection begins with the fantastic 'Dradin in Love'; the story of a former missionary who moves to the city of Ambergris and immediately falls hopelessly in love. The story details Dradin's exploration of Ambergris and his growing infatuation with a woman he has not met. His correspondence with his love is facilitated by a dwarf who has a map of the world tattoed on his head. 'Dradin..' is beautiful and exciting and serves as an excellent introduction to the city of Ambergris.

Second is 'The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris'; a fascinating historical study of the origins of Ambergris. An excellent piece.

Next up is 'The Transformation of Martin Lake' which tells the story of a painter Martin Lake's transformation from an obscure artist to a master. The story is told against the background of a turbulent time in Ambergris. The death of famous composer Voss Bender has polarized the city, dividing the citizens into Reds (Bender supporters) and the Greens (Anti-Bender). This is a beautiful story that justly won the World Fantasy award.

'The Strange Case of X' features a best-selling author named Jeff VanderMeer who is apparently under the delusion that Ambergris actually exists. Nicely done.

The material original to this volume is equally compelling. Most notable is the lengthy biography of the King Squid, a creature native to Ambergris. Both brilliant and hilarious, this piece presents more background to Ambergris.

Also notable is 'The Cage', the story of a strange cage that may have belonged to the mysterious gray caps. The cage is purchased by a pawnbroker (a member of the famous Hoegbotton family) who slowly begins to question his sanity as he spends time around the cage.

The collection is rounded out with a piece 'by' Ambergrisian author Nicholas Sporlender (under which name VanderMeer also wrote 'The Exchange' which is worth tracking down), an expanded Ambergris glossary (which is well worth the 30-40 minutes of reading time. Excellent) and an encrypted story that the reader must decipher word by word. Be forewarned, it will drive you mad.

But the fun doesn't stop there. There is a complete story on the front and back dustjacket, as well as an entertaining fictional biography of VanderMeer inside the DJ.

I have fallen in love with Ambergris. This collection is in a category all its own. I've never seen its like before and don't expect to find another in the near future. This book will be my 2002 Christmas gift to the readers on my list. Make sure you don't miss it. Highly recommended.

For those who have not yet discovered Jeff Vandermeer, and his rich, beautiful, and terrible world called Ambergris, I envy you. Within the pages of City of Saints and Madmen, you will find a rare quality of writing and storytelling that will at turns cause you to laugh, to cringe, to wonder, and to marvel at the audacity and daring of a writer to create these characters, situations, and settings. For those who are looking mainly for great storytelling, human drama, and fantastic settings, you will absolutely find what you are looking for here. However, for those who are also fetishists for exquisite prose, you will find more than you bargained for. Vandermeer's skill with the English language is what is sure to earn him an international following. Reading City of Saints and Madmen, it is clear that the author has slaved over every word, every sentence. I cannot fathom the rewriting, polishing, and sleepless nights that must go into this kind of prose.

Everything in this book is great, but my favorite piece has to be the novella "The Transformation of Martin Lake." This is the one that won the World Fantasy Award, beating out the likes of Lucius Shepard and Tanith Lee that year. Another favorite is "Dradin, In Love," which was a finalist for the prestigious Theodore Sturgeon Award. City of Saints and Madmen is indeed a collection, but if you are primarily a fan of novels, don't let that put you off. The four main pieces are quite long, and each is quite satisfying on its own. This is not just a collection of short stories, but rather more like a cycle of novellas, all set in the same world. Also, this kind of "literary" fantastical writing always brings up the "Is it genre fiction?" question, but I hope that you will find that Vandermeer transcends these concerns in the same way that Jonathan Carrol and Angela Carter do.

Finally, you have probably guessed that given this level of praise (bordering, no doubt, on hyperbole), I was a fan of Jeff Vandermeer's before the publication of this book. If you did, then you guessed right. I have been a fan for many years, and I keep waiting for the world to catch on to this great writer. As you will see from the introduction by Michael Moorcock and the words of praise by China Mieville, Norman Spinrad, Terri Windling, Brian Stableford, Thomas Ligotti, Paul Di Filippo, and Ed Bryant, I am not the only one. Enjoy.

It has been a long time since I've been this excited about being introduced to an author. Indeed, VanderMeer reminds me of the last author to get me this excited, Gene Wolfe. VanderMeer displays the same fine mastery and appreciation for the language as Wolfe, delights in weaving atypical plots as Wolfe does, and for making unexceptional people the focus of a story -- again, as Wolfe does.

Now, if you haven't read any Gene Wolfe (you should do that as soon as you get done with this book), let me explain what that means: pure and absolute delight. Every piece (and it is hard to determine how many there actually are) is stunning in its complexity and richness. Prose like this comes along about once a decade, and I'm glad to be participating in it.

Read this book!

Its difficult to know where to begin describing Jeff VanderMeer's remarkable "City of Saints and Madmen"; with it's interweaving plot lines cutting across stories, one is never sure where one section begins and another leaves off. Moreover, the world of Ambergris is so fully realized, and yet so willfully fanciful, one can never quite find one's footing. In the hands of a less skilled writer, all of this would add up to a bizarre mish-mash, but VanderMeer somehow weaves it together into one unified work.

Moreover, this is a book for booklovers; the arrangement is a work of art in and of itself. The use of fonts, illustrations, footnotes, even the binding adds to the illusion. The cover itself is remarkable, as it contains both a short story and a hilarious fictional biography of the author. VanderMeer and his publisher have succeeded admirably in creating a volume that harkens to an era when books were not only repositories of writing, but valuable for what surrounded the writing.

And what writing it is! VanderMeer flashes descriptive powers that border on the hallucinogenic; the pages absolutely drip with the essence of Ambergris. From the giant squid that inhabit the River Moth, to the serenely vicious Grey Caps, the author has produced a world that is both bizarrely foreign and completely believable at the same time. One of the keys to this success is VanderMeer's wise decision to left some things unsaid; for every piece of information about Ambergris that he doles out, he holds back ten, leaving the reader craving more, but also making his world believable because of its very complexity. In this regard (at least), he is the equal of China Mieville, who has likewise created a world that is both foreign and familiar.

As for the stories themselves, I could spend the entire review on any one of them, but given the constraints of the medium, I'll just touch on some of the highlights. First off is the cover story, which I mentioned above. Although necessarily brief, it immediately introduces the reader to VanderMeer's talent with descriptive phrases like "muscular water". Moreover, it reveals two key things about VanderMeer's writing. The first is that while Ambergris may be fanciful, it is still every bit as brutal (and as beautiful) as our own. The second is VanderMeer's fascinating penchant for self-reference; he seems both fascinated and puzzled by his creation. The result is a desire to nurture it, but a fear of being defined, or even consumed, by it.

Next is "Dradin in Love" which reveals Ambergris in all its glory and horror. Detailing the angst of the eponymous Dradin, it is by turns touching and horrifying. This is by no means a conventional love story; its conclusion questions whether benign illusion is preferable to brutal truth. As with most of these stories, there are illuminating facts dropped elsewhere in the book, particularly one about Dradin's time as a jungle missionary.

Next is a fictional history that details the founding of Ambergris and which is perhaps my favorite story. It is incredibly detailed, richly textured and deftly written. VanderMeer uses this "historical" approach to write a story that is maddeningly incomplete, yet which provides the foundation for much of the rest of the book.

After that is "The Transformation of Martin Lake" which is perhaps the strongest story in terms of message. In it, VanderMeer seems to be commenting on the futility of not just criticism, but history itself. Essentially, since all human action is informed by the mind, and since the mind of another is inherently unknowable, there is a sort of transitive effect whereby all human action, and hence history, is at best a confused muddle. At worst, it is either an ignorant or willful sham perpetrated by those with an agenda or those too stupid to interpret even the limited snapshot into other lives that we are granted.

The second half of the book falls under the bailiwick of "The Strange Case of Mr. X" which is an account of VanderMeer's stay in an Ambergrisian mental hospital. It sounds horribly contrived, but VanderMeer pulls it off nicely. Each story in this latter half is ostensibly an item found in the author's cell after his puzzling disappearance. But far from being distinct, they rather from a whole that can only be appreciated once one has read all the way through them.

They range from an hysterical monograph on the King Squid that inhabit the River Moth to an encoded story. What they all have in common is a bizarre symbiosis that offers insight into each story at the most surprising moments. For example, the aforementioned squid study rewards the reader of the footnotes with a rather poignant glimpse at the "author's" life. Likewise, the coded story isn't just a gimmick; the rather gruesome circumstances of its origin mandate a brutal decoding that mirror the words revealed on the page.

In the end, there's not much more that I can except that "City of Saints and Madmen" is not only one of the most beautifully rendered books I have encountered, but one of the most supremely written. Not since reading Bradbury's collections of short stories have I encountered a collection that feeds off itself so effectively. It reads like a novel even as it sucks the reader into maddeningly brief glimpses of Ambergris. This is a must read, and ranks at the top of the list of books I've read in the last year.

Jake Mohlman

I have read bits and pieces of Vandermeer's work in other anthologies, and I was intrigued enough by his previous writings to see what he might do with an entire volume of his own work. The book in question is one that takes place in the fictional city of Ambergris at varying spots in its long history, and the results are...somewhat uneven.

The book is comprised of two "parts;" first comes a series of short stories/novellas, which is then followed by a series of shorter stories in the form of "apendicies."

The short stories/novellas varied widely in terms of both style and content. In the first, "Dradin, In Love," we are treated to what amounts to a very quick peek into the setup of the city as well as characters that aren't all that well fleshed out - which made me care very little for it. The second, "An Early History of Ambergris," is vastly more entertaining - it is essentially a history of the fictional city, replete with footnotes from the "historian" that were extremely humorous. "The Transformation of Martin Lake" is told from two perspectives - from the perspective of the main character (the mentioned Martin Lake, an artist) as well as an art dealer commenting on Lake's various pieces. The story - while somewhat disjointed - was quite engrossing.

The final main short story is "The Strange Case of X," and...well, I'd say that I wouldn't want to ruin any surprise about this story, but there isn't really all that much surprise to be had. If you can't figure out the twist of the story, you probably couldn't have been bothered to read through the first three stories.

The remainder of the book (the aforementioned "apendicies") are particularly hit or miss, and I gave up reading them when I got to the "encrypted" story - I'm sorry, but I don't have either the time or inclination to go through previous parts of the book to figure out page/paragraph/sentence/word for a rather lengthy story.

This book is a collection of four stories set in the city of Ambergris. Though there are tenuous links between the four, they are separate works and I will discuss them separately.

"The Early History of Ambergris" was the first of the four I read, though it is actually second in the book. It is an extremely funny account of the city's history, told through the persona of an imaginary historian. Despite the humor, it seems more real than one would expect, and I found myself forming opinions on the authenticity of imaginary documents. Now that I have read the acknowledgments, I find that the writing style is actually a real historian's. I must find out more about that guy.

"Dradin, In Love" is the first story, though I read it second. It is a Kafkaesque nightmare, starting out in mere confusion and spiralling downward into madness. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain anything really interesting; it's just a sequence of progressively more disturbing images, few of which are particualrly original or aesthetically interesting. Not that another review on this page gives away something extremely important about this story.

"The Transformation of Martin Lake" is much better. It chronicles a series of dramatic events in the life of an Ambergrisian artist. Though magnificent for what it tells, it is also infuriating (in a good way) for what it does not tell. It is also genuinely scary, more so than much so-called "horror" fiction. I would call this the best story here.

"The Strange Case of X" is the shortest story, and feels almost like an addendum. It is very interesting, as so many stories about madmen tend to be. VanderMeer's descriptive language is wonderfully hallucinatory. I regret that it was published here, however, as this caused me to assume from the start one of the story's crucial surprises.

Though the stories included here were very good, I was disappointed that the city of Ambergris itself did not figure more strongly into the book. Other reviewers here and elsewhere have said that the setting is incredible, but it didn't come alive for me in the same way that Middle-earth, New Crobuzon, or the other truly great settings do. I also felt somewhat shortchanged, given how little text there is here relative to the book's price.

In his introduction to this book, Michael Moorcock writes that "It's what you've been looking for." I have indeed been seeking something like this collection, but it didn't quite fulfill my hopes. I do recommend it, though. It's very different from anything else I've read, and VanderMeer has some truly original ideas. In his next books, I may indeed find what I am looking for.