Sunday, July 26, 2009

City of Saints and Madmen

Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen is sui generis -- I've never read anything like it. About half of the novel consists of five novellas about the fictional town of Ambergris (and one of those already stretches the term "novella" to the breaking point.) Then add in a glossary, a monograph on king squid, stories by characters from oter stories, and you end up with an unclassifiable novel.

This isn't just a collection of short stories -- the stories wind around each other, connecting to each other in strange ways, sometimes contradicting each other with unreliable narrators. There's also a post-modern veneer, with locations like the Borges Bookstore, and a character from Chicago, but a Chicago in which Ambergris is so successful that Disney has made a movie about it. I'm classifying this book as fantasy below, but really that's just because I don't have a category for unclassifiable.

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