Catherynne M. Valente

Palimpsest

"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 wor

Ok, WOW.
4.5 stars

This book came as a complete surprise for me, but it only took two pages until I was stuck to it. The biggest draw for me was the writing style, specifically the technical skill and the beautiful images that tied every single word together. This book was amazing in that regard. Valente has such a way with words, and I think that is primarily why I'm giving this book such a high rating. 

This book appears to not be so popular among every single reader, and I will hypothesize that they read through the book looking for different things than I did. Because it was the writing itself that kept me glued to it, I really, really enjoyed this book, and the plot could have been awful for all I cared (I mean, at some point, I would have noticed and been unhappy with a shitty plot, but to some extent this is still true), but I don't think that's true for other readers. So that's a caveat.

Seriously, though, this is what I wish I wrote like. Everything was so vivid but the characters seemed to have their stream of consciousness lie in the body of a poem rather than in the mundane world. And especially the way that Valente described San Francisco — it made me so happy as a norcal native.

“She could never escape the feeling of strange Spanish holiness that California bestowed—the cities named for saints, angels, benediction. The capital itself a sacrament. Like communion wafers she tasted the places on her tongue, the red roof tiles blood-vivid. Her own blood bisected the state, her mother, retired, warming her bones against the southern sea, her father, dead ten years, buried in the wet northern moss.”

“Long before he died, November’s father was gone, up north, away from his wife and the sea. They could not bear each other, in the end, and perhaps a thing begun in blood and death and salt must end that way. They could not live with less than three mountain ranges to separate them. And between them they strung their daughter, and like a shining black bead counting out refutations of love, she slowly slid back and forth, back and forth.”

“How we gather at this dull gray gate, knowing that the golden one is a lie. It is only there for show. The faithful know that God lives nowhere near gold. The tourists gawk at the orange cathedral, while the wise gather here, in the low and long, waiting “How we are willing to wait, she thought, like a line of penitent adulterers at a white altar, to be allowed into the city. How we gather at this dull gray gate, knowing that the golden one is a lie. It is only there for show. The faithful know that God lives nowhere near gold. The tourists gawk at the orange cathedral, while the wise gather here, in the low and long, waiting patiently to hand over their coins and be permitted, for a moment, to look upon, but not touch, the mass of jewels and offerings in which San Francisco wallows."

And that's really only the beginning of it.

The reason I dinged it a half star (and this is probably a bigger issue for other readers of Palimpsest) is that the antagonists didn't feel enough like antagonists or like problems to really make the conflict of this book super interesting. Instead of someone like Casimira (maybe) or the scary ass Dvorniki or Nerezza acting as the antagonists, the real antagonists seemed to be the characters' own ignorance of Quartos or whatever, which was a tension quickly dissolved with the revelations of November. And from there it seemed easy enough for them to all gather in one place. So I guess I could have used a little more pushback against the main four people — again, the closest we get to that is Nerezza, but that seems short-lived and halfhearted, and is almost immediately put to rest with November's arrival.

So, yeah. Still. Definitely a great read.

Palimpsest

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