glasstatterdemalion's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
naokamiya's review
4.0
Exactly the type of weird fantasy energy I've been craving lately, it has a similar sense of seemingly endlessly flourishing idiosyncratic worldbuilding and imagination as a Mieville or a Barker but in structure and development is much more properly strange in terms of the uncanny sensations it conjures, making it land somewhere between kitchen sink dark fantasy and off-kilter bizarro fiction in the realm of a Ligotti or a Schulz. Kinda unfurls like a psychedelic weird-horror magical realism, imagery and sensations coalescing over each other like a kaleidoscope of drugged out genre fiction mechanisms entwining within one another effortlessly. Smoothly crafted with beautiful prose that unfolds like a river of language while avoiding direct indulgence in tropes while skirting juuuuuust close enough to their edges that it satisfies both my literary and fantasy loving sides alike, this definitely felt like a novel tailor made for my tastes.
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."
tregina's review against another edition
3.0
So on the one hand, I love the vividly strange imagery, the glorious idea of being a word-finder, and the dreamlike transitions from state to state. On the other, I felt like it almost leaned too far in the direction of surrealism when I was yearning for more meaty detail about his existence and vocation. I love the weird, but it turns out I love the weird most within a stronger narrative line. Still, not something I'm going to soon forget.
nickanderson's review
4.0
I had no idea you could write this way. Each surreal image is rendered so clearly, I had trouble getting myself back out of it. It's a hard read - there's no skimming, and it might take you as long to read as a novel twice its length. I wouldn't say there was much in the way of a satisfying narrative arc, either - rather, this is a good book for someone looking to drift idly in the imagery of another world, not race to an ending point. I read it on a 12 hour plane flight, so I was a captive audience - but I loved every second I spent in San Venificio.
theartolater's review against another edition
4.0
This book is short and to the point, which I'm definitely into, but in terms of "New Weird" (which this qualifies in a sense even though it's older), why this works is the way it builds toward the reveals. You meet the main character, and piece by piece drips out until you see the full picture as to what is happening. And it's wonderful and grotesque and so well put together that it was difficult for me not to really just love what was going on.
Closer to a 4.5, as it definitely isn't perfect, but the amount of raves this book has gotten is well-deserved. If you like strange stuff, check it.
Closer to a 4.5, as it definitely isn't perfect, but the amount of raves this book has gotten is well-deserved. If you like strange stuff, check it.
kateofmind's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
theladyofthehouseoflove's review against another edition
4.0
Surreal experience reading this. It was like I was hypnotized.
cmrosens's review against another edition
4.0
A weird love affair with words
This book feels on some levels like a deep love affair with words and texts and language, although it’s hard to tell if the odd moments of fragmented sentences and full stops in odd places are deliberate or just a mistake in the edition I read.
The sentences can be up to a paragraph long, and the “less is more” adage hasn’t bothered Cisco much, so if spare poetic prose is your thing, this may not be to your taste.
I found it the book equivalent of watching an aquarium: the plot is simple and kicks in about halfway through, but you don’t need to know (or understand) what’s going on to enjoy the immersion, and in some ways concentrating too hard on it is going to spoil it. It was the perfect thing to read on the train home after work and let it trigger random thoughts about my own relationship with words & texts, things I don’t get much time to think about these days...
The book itself centres the nameless Divinity Student, struck by lightning in a storm in Ch 1 & brought back to life by eldritch creatures who open him up and stuff him full of ancient texts. He’s re-birthed as a Weird Golem type person, and sent off to San Veneficio to become a word-finder. He is meant to be undercover and is trying to recover a lost catalogue of forbidden (?) words, the Eclogue, destroyed & lost.
He learns how to enter the minds of dead creatures via a memorable wtf moment with magic & formaldehyde, and demonic cars try to stop him in a man versus machine sub-plot.
As the plot goes,that’s all of it, but the plot itself isn’t really the point of the book and it’s not really possible to “spoil” it in the traditional sense, because ... there’s nothing to spoil?!
It’s very fantastical, abstract, full of magical realism techniques like the way ‘reality’, ‘visions’ & ‘dreams’ are mashed together seamlessly so that those categories break down and you’re never sure what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. It’s a story that made me think mainly about obsession with texts & words - sacred texts, in particular - and of being stuffed full of other people’s canonical texts, other people’s language, and struggling to find words and a voice of my own.
Miss Woodwind, the master word finder, has her own voice and that’s why she’s so good at finding other people’s words... she wants the Divinity Student to drink some water (a cleansing, purifying, refreshing thing, with associations of forward movement etc) but he wants to drink/inhale atomised formaldehyde (preservative fluid) and stagnate in the memories of the dead and re-live their texts and words instead.
I suppose it left me with a feeling that there were so many layers to this that one sitting wouldn’t be enough to get all of them. The tree spirits and their porcelain mouths, the folkloric elements, the monitor lizards and their reflective eyes like stars in the desert... there’s some gorgeous imagery here that I really enjoyed.
I guess the main questions I’m left with (apart from “what did I just read? What happened? What’s going on?”) are:
-how do you deal with being stuffed with other people’s views of “canonical” texts?
-Which texts were foundational for me, that are now part of my cultural, emotional, psychological makeup? Do I need to address/dismantle some of this?
-How do you find your own voice if you’re obsessed with other people’s?
-What words/texts give me “life”? Are they mine, as in, did I choose them, or were they given to me? Is that necessarily bad?
I liked the dreamlike, abstracted wandering through these types of questions and the edge-of-madness themes that come from following an obsessive character without a name or a voice of his own.
I definitely see why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I’m giving it 4 stars anyway.
This book feels on some levels like a deep love affair with words and texts and language, although it’s hard to tell if the odd moments of fragmented sentences and full stops in odd places are deliberate or just a mistake in the edition I read.
The sentences can be up to a paragraph long, and the “less is more” adage hasn’t bothered Cisco much, so if spare poetic prose is your thing, this may not be to your taste.
I found it the book equivalent of watching an aquarium: the plot is simple and kicks in about halfway through, but you don’t need to know (or understand) what’s going on to enjoy the immersion, and in some ways concentrating too hard on it is going to spoil it. It was the perfect thing to read on the train home after work and let it trigger random thoughts about my own relationship with words & texts, things I don’t get much time to think about these days...
The book itself centres the nameless Divinity Student, struck by lightning in a storm in Ch 1 & brought back to life by eldritch creatures who open him up and stuff him full of ancient texts. He’s re-birthed as a Weird Golem type person, and sent off to San Veneficio to become a word-finder. He is meant to be undercover and is trying to recover a lost catalogue of forbidden (?) words, the Eclogue, destroyed & lost.
He learns how to enter the minds of dead creatures via a memorable wtf moment with magic & formaldehyde, and demonic cars try to stop him in a man versus machine sub-plot.
As the plot goes,that’s all of it, but the plot itself isn’t really the point of the book and it’s not really possible to “spoil” it in the traditional sense, because ... there’s nothing to spoil?!
It’s very fantastical, abstract, full of magical realism techniques like the way ‘reality’, ‘visions’ & ‘dreams’ are mashed together seamlessly so that those categories break down and you’re never sure what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. It’s a story that made me think mainly about obsession with texts & words - sacred texts, in particular - and of being stuffed full of other people’s canonical texts, other people’s language, and struggling to find words and a voice of my own.
Miss Woodwind, the master word finder, has her own voice and that’s why she’s so good at finding other people’s words... she wants the Divinity Student to drink some water (a cleansing, purifying, refreshing thing, with associations of forward movement etc) but he wants to drink/inhale atomised formaldehyde (preservative fluid) and stagnate in the memories of the dead and re-live their texts and words instead.
I suppose it left me with a feeling that there were so many layers to this that one sitting wouldn’t be enough to get all of them. The tree spirits and their porcelain mouths, the folkloric elements, the monitor lizards and their reflective eyes like stars in the desert... there’s some gorgeous imagery here that I really enjoyed.
I guess the main questions I’m left with (apart from “what did I just read? What happened? What’s going on?”) are:
-how do you deal with being stuffed with other people’s views of “canonical” texts?
-Which texts were foundational for me, that are now part of my cultural, emotional, psychological makeup? Do I need to address/dismantle some of this?
-How do you find your own voice if you’re obsessed with other people’s?
-What words/texts give me “life”? Are they mine, as in, did I choose them, or were they given to me? Is that necessarily bad?
I liked the dreamlike, abstracted wandering through these types of questions and the edge-of-madness themes that come from following an obsessive character without a name or a voice of his own.
I definitely see why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I’m giving it 4 stars anyway.
morporum's review against another edition
5.0
Best . . .
.. . opening scene .. .
. . . amazing city . . .
... man who walks into town . . .
.. . use of formaldehyde in fiction . . .
... EVAR.
.. . opening scene .. .
. . . amazing city . . .
... man who walks into town . . .
.. . use of formaldehyde in fiction . . .
... EVAR.