Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
beautiful yet darkly secretive Ambergris, 8 April 2004
Come and see a city, one like no other, filled with more madmen than saints.
You'll find no farmboys possesing magic talents here, no buff warriors or mighty sorcerors... instead the beautiful yet darkly secretive Ambergris is populated by out-of-work missionaries, struggling artists, unhinged marinebiologists (and at least one slightly unhinged author) and other still more curious individuals. Each is led into the darkest corners of both the city and the human consciousness, and every tale is woven through with the silent question that no Ambergrisian can answer - the darkest of all the city's secrets. Not only does VanderMeer present his readers with finely crafted, delicately sculpted prose on every turning page but as the readers are propelled into appendices and glossaries, footnotes, bibliographies they are continuously rewarded with the most imaginative and most fully-realised fiction being written today. It may also be the most beautifully presented artifact of fiction you could hope to possess - painstakingly designed from cover to cover, filled with illustrations and diagrams, each designed to draw the reader further down the rabbit hole. By turns darkly horrific, emotionally charged and hilariously comic, City of Saints and Madmen is a wonderfully clever, crazed and adventurous collection of experiences you cannot miss out on.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insanely Ambitious, Divinely Delicious, 24 Mar 2005
On the surface, City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of short stories set in the fantastic city of Ambergris, stories suffused with sorrow and wry humour, some of them straightforward, others told through various metafictional conceits and devices. On the surface, we have four novellas and an appendix of sundry shorter delights. But apart from the fact that each story is an absolute nugget in its own right, there's much more going on here in the way these tales relate to each other. As the novellas progress, various fake historical glossaries, academic footnotes and art history interpolations are used to make Ambergris far more rounded and real than most fantasy backdrops, building VanderMeer's city of musicians, poets and sinister mushroom-dwellers in the reader's imagination until in the last of the four novellas we are taken right through the looking glass. In an insanely ambitious move reminiscent of Alasdair Gray's Lanark, or a writer such as Borges, fact and fiction are flipped inside-out and the reader is plunged deep into a world all the truer because it is given to us through the artefacts of Ambergris --illustrated chapbooks, monograms, bibliographies, magazine clippings or lunatic's notes. Metafiction can be tricky in its tricksiness, but VanderMeer pulls it off wonderfully. In a way this becomes a novel with the reader himself as the protagonist, a traveller wandering through VanderMeer's strange, dark, literary vision. And, lit with flashes of sheer brilliance, VanderMeer's Ambergris is more than just worth a visit. This is a must-read book, a delightful treat for the fan of fantasy as a genre, for those who enjoy Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or any of the Magic Realists. In the end this book is for anyone who likes their books intelligent, playful, comic, tragic and with a vision just a wee bit skewed from the norm.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wondrous Escapism, 27 Feb 2005
The City of Saints and Madmen is an impressive work - a wonderful piece of escapism which I have thoroughly enjoyed.
The legendary city of Ambergris is a timeless and fascinating place with strange recurring motifs - grey caps, mushroom dwellers, squid, a firm called Hoegbottom and sons, and various fighting factions, poets, and artists - to name just a few. As I read I became totally absorbed in this fantastical world with its own rules and surreal history. Even though I know this place does not really exist I kept believing that it does: the stories are convincing, and the characters seem real even though they cannot be. I realise now that I have finished that everything must has been worked out with an extraordinary vision because there was not a single instance where I did not believe that what was happening could have happened, somewhere far away just beyond the limit of the world I know. The most decisive and chilling aspect of the history is the Silence. This haunts the book and it haunts me still - it is the fear of the unknown, only in part ever revealed, which makes the event powerful and disturbing. I thought I could see parallels with various aspects of human history, and the Silence could even be allegorical for certain many unexplained events that have really happened - which I think is always the case in the best Sci-Fi/fantasy writing.
The story of the city gradually evolves in a series of pieces - short stories, letters, papers, even a long and entertaining bibliography - a jigsaw which gradually builds up to something complete and satisfying. It begins very well, but ends wonderfully with some beautifully written and gripping stories.
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