Palimpsest (Paperback)

~ Catherynne Valente (Author)
Key Phrases: green wind, third rail, Floor of Heaven, New York, Kami of Engines (more...)

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: 384 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553385763
• ISBN-13: 978-0553385762
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #18,030 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deny Plato and give it form, February 24, 2009

By	Raven (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

I respectfully disagree with the prevalent trope that reading is a passive pursuit wherein you are imprinted with the artistic stamp of your favorite author. You can read like that, sure, but it's the literary equivalent of aspiring to couch potato status. Some books deserve better. If they transfix you, you transfix them right back. [grin] It's a dynamic gestalt. Great books deserve the best reading that you can give them, and what you get out of the experience can in part be determined by what you bring to it. I've just finished one such, Catherynne Valente's "Palimpsest". I started the book in the company of strangers, suspended ten thousand feet above the ground with clouds under my feet. It's a good beginning to a story about liminality and transition. I carried the book with me onto the train and read its gospel of transit in context. It's a book about chance occurrences that aren't, and the book and I had vegetarian egg rolls and fortune cookies in a Chinatown cafe. It's a book about sex, and I read it naked in the bed of my absent lover, curled up in her comforter with her miniature snow-leopards purring at my feet and hip. It's a book about connection, and I read it out loud and by turns with a friend I have known since she was in high school, chapter for chapter and verse for verse, spanning two cities with one story. It is a book about complicated emotions, and I read it over the bodies of the unconscious and behind the backs of the dreaming, and when I had picked over the themes of its bones I sought them out and gave them what I could here and now. I'm going to buy seven copies of it and leave them in my wake, stashed under pillows and on end-tables, indelible for those who read them. Art deserves nothing less; I loved this book.

11 of 12 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	Rebecca Baumann "www.DirtySexyBooks.com" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

14 of 16 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 (Oregon, United States) - See all my reviews

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.