Palimpsest [Paperback]

Catherynne Valente (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 24, 2009

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s kiss.…

Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse—a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers: Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They’ve each lost something important—a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life—and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Four strangers are bound together in adventure, love and occasional sorrow in this parable from Tiptree winner Valente (The Orphan's Tales). The city of Palimpsest exists somewhere outside our reality, accessible only during the sleep that follows sex. The immigrants to Palimpsest, marked forever by the tattoo-like impression of a map on their skin, seek out one another for real-world sexual adventures that function as passports to new otherworldly quarters. In outstandingly beautiful prose, Valente describes grotesque, glamorous creatures sometimes neither human nor animal, alive nor dead, and mortal travelers who pursue poignant personal quests to replace the things (and people) they've lost. Valente's fondness for digression at times makes for a difficult read, and her fable of quest and loneliness is less an engrossing fairy tale and more a meticulous travelogue of a stranger's dream. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Everyone lucky or doomed enough to go to Palimpsest, a city visited only in dreams, awakes bearing a tattooed map of its neighborhoods. Each of four travelers linked by ink stains in a frog-headed fortune-teller’s shop finds an unimaginable fate in the city, such that waking life becomes a search for readmission to Palimpsest. Sei dreams of trains, November of mechanical bees, Ludovico of the unwritten etymology of the city, and Oleg of his drowned sister. Palimpsest becomes what each most desires in ways only a city of sentient trains, mechanical insects, and shark-headed generals could. History unfolds as the four learn the ways of Palimpsest and discover the price of becoming more than tourists. Each has found something he or she lost in the waking world that is reimagined in the ways of Palimpsest, and nearly everyone who goes there yearns to emigrate. Overflowing with poetic images and epic repetition, Valente’s story washes us to an unexpected shore. --Regina Schroeder

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Product Details

• Paperback: 367 pages
• Publisher: Spectra; Original edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553385763
• ISBN-13: 978-0553385762
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (115 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #205,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Catherynne M. Valente is an author, poet, and sometime critic who has been known to write as many as six impossible things before breakfast. She is to blame for over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including The Orphan's Tales, Palimpsest, Deathless, and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She has won the Tiptree Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Lambda Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award for best web fiction. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, an enormous cat, and a slightly less enormous accordion.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

178 of 209 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

By Mrs. Baumann VINE™ VOICE

Format: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.

46 of 54 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

By Juushika

Format: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.

78 of 97 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A Dissenting Opinion May 18, 2009

By Karen A. Bruce

Format:Paperback

It's rare that I cannot finish a book, but I gave up on Palimpsest about a hundred pages into it. I found the concept compelling, but I was annoyed by the execution. The author seems incapable of writing a single sentence without using some form of metaphor or simile. While I understand that's a stylistic decision, it's not one that works for me. Because of it, her work strikes me as being gaudy and rococo, as being about rhetorical display rather than telling a story. Essentially, read many of the reviews of this book (which are, uh, imitative of her style), and imagine them expanded into several hundred pages. If that appeals to you, go ahead. If it doesn't, buy another book.