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158 of 177 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I didn't get it at all, but perhaps the blame is all mine... It's a glorious mess of dreamy imagery, July 18, 2009
This review is from: Palimpsest (Paperback)
Plot Summary: Four scattered individuals enter Palimpsest after having mindless, thoughtless, impulsive sex with a person bearing a map-like tattoo (ah-hem, with no consideration for gender). This unexplainable land feels disjointed and distorted like a dream. Nothing is tangible or nailed down, and horrors and pleasures wash over our characters in equal measure. Once someone visits Palimpsest, their skin is marked forever with the map tatoo, and some unfortunates get it smack on their face. I particularly envy the lady who got it on her tongue.
It's been a while since I've encountered a book I couldn't, or wouldn't finish, but when reading feels like a chore, rather than a pleasure, it's time to move on. I have a love-hate feeling for this novel, because part of me is awed by the pure poetry of the images Catherynne Valente brings forth. Some of her sentences should be framed and mounted on a wall, like art. They were simply gorgeous.
But, and there is a big BUT here, I never felt like there was something I could grab onto. I was lost in this mad, beautiful, horrible dream, and I just wanted to wake up and put my feet on solid ground again. Valente never lets the reader ground herself on terra firma, or get a sense that here is one world, and there is the other. The two worlds mix and blend together until I was dizzy and wanted to throw up.
The writing is very close to pure poetry, and it drove me mad trying to piece together the disconnected fragments of this story. It's a hard, hard read, and I need so much more structure in a story to feel happy there. I can't help wishing that the earth-bound parts of the story reflected a hard, cold reality, and thereby provide a juxtaposition between the living and dreaming. It was an intriguing vision, but one that I could not hold onto.
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43 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Feels a bit short, but this book is a journey of great magic and great emotion, and it is a true joy to read. Highly recommended, March 15, 2009
This review is from: Palimpsest (Paperback)
Four strangers, each suffering the loss of something in their life, are drawn together in a city called Palimpsest, a place that they can only visit in dreams brought on by sex with a fellow immigrant to the city. Palimpsest is a word of magic and opportunity, but it demands great payment if they hope to live there forever. Valente's writing too is magic, painting a vibrant fantasy which is shadowed by beautifully realistic characters. Although it feels somewhat short, it is a beautiful book which transports the reader, and altogether deeply enjoyable. I highly recommend it.
If you have read Valente's other works, then you will love this--and have probably already read it. (As will soon be obvious, I've so far only read her previous series The Orphan's Tales.) Her voice lyrical and richly textured, and it rings true in the vibrant tapestry which is Palimpsest. It has also matured somewhat since the Orphan's Tales: the metaphors are better integrated, and so the text is smoother and less repetitive. Her story-telling has also improved: there is a better balance, here, between the glimpses into Palimpsest's hidden corners and the overarching plot that brings the protagonists together, and so the reader is dazzled and emotionally engaged in careful measure. The characters glow, unique and faulted and inspiring. And of course the world that she builds is magic, the sort of magic which demands blood payment for the greatest miracles. Palimpsest is grittier and more tightly focused than Orphan's Tales, but if you have loved her style before, you will love it again here. And if you have never picked up Valente's work, this is still a good place to begin--her magic will sweep you away.
For all that, Palimpsest isn't perfect. It feels short, not because too little happens but because the book ends at the very moment of a great event. It's still a complete story, but since it ends on the very brink of change, the reader's last thought is to look forward--and there is nothing there. Perhaps a literary accomplishment, this is still incredibly frustrating. Still, if my loudest complaint is that I wish there were more, that still counts as a successful book. I enjoyed Orphan's Tales more, as a longer and broader story that it is, but Palimpsest is an incredible read and I am sure that I will come back to it. Valente is the sort of author who make me pause often, taking the space between each chapter as a chance to put the book down, breathe deep, and savor the words and imagine myself into the pages. That is the truest fantasy that I could wish for, and so I love her work--and recommend it with all enthusiasm.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
In the falling dark, the rising wind of boredom creeps stealthily over her teacups, covering them in the frosting of ennui..., October 12, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
How do you write a review for such a fascinating and interesting experiment, even if the experiment is one gone so horribly wrong? Let me say that I wanted SO MUCH to love this book. The idea was fresh and interesting, and one gets the idea that the author must be a fascinating person to talk to...but mercy, please. I beg you. Somewhere, Hemingway is lighting himself on fire.
Palimpsest is a novel designed to take full advantage of the English language in all its breathtaking complexity. It stretches the length of sentences and ideas to their limits, at its best playful and erotic, extravagant and wanton. Unfortunately, while each individual sentence or paragraph may be maximally lovely, in the end, it comes across as an overly baroque exercise in semicolons, rivers of cream, and atmospheric bees. Aside from the almost comically rococo curlicues of the language, the author has replaced character development with character description--something to be enjoyed for a time, but then leaving a giant blank in your understanding.
The dreamlike atmosphere, once more a lovely idea, ultimately also becomes a hindrance. An entire novel with poorly motivated characters, difficult to comprehend world rules, and magical realism influenced logic would be a challenge at best, but ultimately, this novel collapses in on itself like a giant creme brulee served by a beetle to a woman wearing a fur and green eyeshadow, who previously had been in the whirlwind, the aching whirlwind of desire and phantoms, with beestung lips and maps of forever between her hands.
Lastly, the narration was painful. I hope never to listen to this reader again. She took a complicated text and imbued it with all the immediacy of a used pair of knee high hose, morose and boring at every turn. Her accents were laughable, her voices almost indistinguishable. A text as labrynthine as this deserves a brilliant reader to bring it to life, but instead, it hung limply in midair.
I wish this book had lived up to its promise. Ultimately, however, it was a slog to get to the end.
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