skygiants

At Dragon*Con this year I fell a little bit in love with this stained-glass-style artwork -- especally the piece The Map, based on Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest.

Problem: I had not yet read Palimpsest.

FRIENDS: So buy it, and then read Palimpsest!
BECCA: But what if I read Palimpsest and I hate it? WHAT IF IT RUINS EVERYTHING?
FRIENDS: So buy it and don't read Palimpsest.
BECCA: BUT THEN I'LL FEEL LIKE A POSER.
FRIENDS: So then don't buy it.
BECCA: BUT IT'S SO PRETTY.
FRIENDS: So buy it, or don't buy it, but stop standing here agonizing about it, because we would kind of like to do something else with our day eventually . . .

. . . I bought it. Then I read Palimpsest.

I'm going to start out by saying that Palimpsest is the first book I've read of Catherynne M. Valente's that didn't make me think "oh, just like The Orphan's Tales!" I mean, it's like The Orphan's Tales in the way that Valente is the person who wrote The Orphan's Tales, and she is interested in lush and surrealist worldbuilding constructed out of dream-logic and intertextuality. But that doesn't always have to do the same thing and here it very much doesn't.

I don't actually like it the best of Valente's post-Orphan's Tales books, because it's doing things that are less relevant to my interests, but that is more about me than it is about the book.

Palimpsest is a sexually transmitted city -- that is, you sleep with someone who has a bit of the city on them, and then you get a piece of the city and you get to go there in your dreams. You have to sleep with different people with different parts of the city on them to get with different bits, and most people find themselves obsessed enough that they do. We follow four protagonists on their further obsessive adventures:

SEI: a train fetishist whose issues are wrapped up in her dead mother
OLEG: a key fetishist whose issues are wrapped up in his undead sister
LUDOVICO: a book fetishist whose issues are wrapped up in his disappeared wife
NOVEMBER: a bee fetishist whose issues are not really wrapped up in anyone in her life and more in the fact that the most powerful woman in Palimpsest seems really intent on having a vaguely abusive relationship with her

I don't think like a Valente character. People in Palimpsest have a lot of concerns, but they don't ever deal in the mundane. So reading Palimpsest was a lot like reading someone else's dream -- which is how it's designed to be -- but it wasn't ever like I could have been reading my dream, it wasn't like I could have been any of those people. I don't know. It was interesting! I wasn't bored, but I also kind of felt like I needed a Diana Wynne Jones or something afterwards to detox myself down from all the IMPOSSIBLY INTENSE SYMBOLIC AND SURREALISTIC IMAGERY.

Fortunately the poster in my room is going to go up across from a Kate Beaton print so I think I have that covered.

(Also, Oleg lives in an ostensibly real New York City, and Valente gets very poetic about it, but whatever city it is, it's not my New York City.)

Checking in from Brooklyn! NYC public transit is down for the foreseeable future, so we're sitting pretty in our apartment for now, but that's not a terrible hardship as we have in general weathered the storm extremely well with no more inconvenience than a leak or two in the skylight. We didn't even get a power outage excuse to use our candles of last resort -- the only ones we could find at last minute in the local grocery store were saint's candles, so now St. Jude and St. Barbara are sitting judgily in our Jewish-atheist-Baptist kitchen and probably feeling very out of place.

While I'm talking about displaced saints, though, I may as well use that to segue into a booklog of Catherynne M. Valente's The Habitation of the Blessed. I've been meaning to read more of Valente's work since I read and loved The Orphan's Tales in college, but this is the first one I've actually gotten around to, and I think maybe it was the wrong first one to read post-Orphan's Tales. The impression I've gotten of Valente's work from summaries is that most of her books are very different from each other and Habitation of the Blessed did . . . not actually feel all that different from The Orphan's Tales. I mean, to sum up, we have:

- a collection of stealthily and less-stealthily interlocking narratives (four, in this case - Prester John's, his blemmye wife's, a fantastical nursemaid's, and the frame narrative of the Christian expeditionary force that discovers and interpolates them)
- mostly about 'monstrous' creatures with various different wildly imaginative cultural norms going about their lives in a way that shocks and scandalizes the normative dudes who come across them
- with an emphasis on the POWER OF STORIES and pointedly overturning traditional morality and narrative imagery

In this case, the source of the imagery that Valente's playing around with is medieval Christian philosophy and hagiography rather than fairy tales, but the effect (especially to someone who's not super familiar with medieval Christian philosophy and hagiography) is not all that different. And still totally enjoyable; Valente is always incredibly creative, and reading the book felt a bit like diving into a swimming pool of fantastical imagery and seeing what was stuck when I came out, which is a feeling I'm generally a fan of. So basically, if you liked The Orphan's Tales you will probably like this, but it was a bit weirdly deja vu-ish. I am going to read the next book in this series whenever it comes out, but I am also hoping to see more of what she can do.