City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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And what a city it is. Through the book, we learn about its history, its customs, and its inhabitants. We learn of the mysterious gray cap people, the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, a few famous artists and composers. There are references to mushrooms and squid scattered throughout. There’s a nice sense of atmosphere, too. I appreciate it when writers refer to in-universe books, plays, works of art, historical events – it makes a setting feel much more lived in and less like a set piece for the story. Most of the above subject matter draws attention to the self-consciousness and sub-consciousness of everyday living. His defence is that the alleged crime happened only in Ambergris, a fictitious world, not in “real life”.

In this case? I'd call this a tightly interwoven series of stories and faux academic papers surrounding the fictional city of Abergris. Expect strange mushrooms that range from hallucinogenic to graphically horrific to a high-grade fever dream of a Lovecraftian occultist. While he draws the cityscape with precision, he also draws its emotional landscape with expressionist accuracy.

We recall Captain Aylett’s Beerlight and Pilot Etchells’ Endland, whose mores and customs are at once so familiar and so strange to us. Since the great expansion, Captains DiFilippo, Constantine, Miéville, Gentle and Newman all return with alien currency from new worlds. Others with a taste for exotic geographies continue to seek the Unending Parallel. All have left accounts. The best words to describe it would be “delightfully insane.” Because it is. Utterly batshit and utterly fascinating. I was reminded quite profoundly of Mozart. I should mention that I'm not fond of Mozart's 'lighter' earlier works. Pretty as a picture as they may be, but there is for me, no soul, no real depth in them. However, I actually get goose bumps just thinking of his Requiem. The window looked down on the city proper, which lay inside the cupped hands of a valley veined with tributaries of the Moth. It was there that ordinary people slept and dreamt not of jungles and humidity and the lust that fed and starved men’s hearts, but of quiet walks under the stars and milk-fat kittens and the gentle hum of wind on wooden porches. For a short collection, you might be tempted to way what's here equally and end up with basically a quarter of the collection as lame and forgettable. But that would be foolish. At least two of these stories are show stoppers, A+ Hall of Fame genre-fiction short stories, with two more high quality ones bringing up the rear.

It is written in the form of excerpts from dairies and history books, complete with "clashes of opinion by historians" to add to the fun. Also, the mushroom plot deepens. I was already pulled in by the first story, "Dradin, In Love", but when I noticed the next story was a heavily footnoted "history", complete with referential glossary, I knew I had found an author who gets as lost in the worlds he creates as I do as a reader. Then I continued reading... I'm struggling with how to think about this book. 3 stars is inadequate to express how I felt about many of the individual stories contained in the collection. By themselves, they were very good - atmospheric, creepy, well-written, well-imagined, etc. The Hoegbotton Family History & The Cage: So much detail. Everything about this book is in the details. The title of the book the Cage appears in is Details of a Tyrant & Other Stories, but we're only told by being observant of the header, the fonts, the pseudo-intertextuality, the hints of a unifying voice in the repetition of “X” and “pathetic” and “sour,” these are all powerful details that offer countless possibilities for interpretation. Are they clues? Are they red herrings? Are they intentional? Are they mere quirks of the real life VanderMeer? Do they mean anything? Is the hand in the Cage from the sweaty priestess? Did the cage belong to Dradin? Does it matter? I’m not sure that I care if any of this means anything. I know that I am loving my complete immersion in the waters of Ambergris, and I think that may be all that matters. Otherwise, it becomes the equivalent of Gene Wolfe's New Sun books, where there's supposed to be this huge, complex, interesting meta-story behind the real story, as long as you reread it and carefully put together all the pieces--but why would anyone want to reread a dull story over and over in hopes that it might become interesting? It becomes the equivalent of the epic fantasy standby: 'You have to keep reading until the fifth book, that's when it gets good. A good author ensures that the story is intriguing on both the small and large scale.Such lunacy is, of course, tragic and sad in a personage of such raw literary talent, but it is an ancient axiom that genius and madness are the most loving of bedmates. Yet, there is a need in us to keep going, to keep carving away at our work--especially when we see the errors in it, which we always do. Once you've passed that point of no return, where each additional mark just muddles it a little bit more, it can be almost impossible to stop, to salvage something from it. Much easier to start over--and usually, to make the same mistake again. Vandermeer's Ambergris is one of the most underrated settings I think I've come across. He's just an unfathomably underrated writer in general, especially of his not-explicitly SF stuff (even if he doesn't take up the mantle of a true-blue SF writer. Disappointing, but I forgive you, Jeff!) like what speed Ambergris coasts in.

ALSO, The Hoegbotton Series of Guidebooks & Maps to the Festival, Safe Places, Hazards, and Blindfolds.VanderMeer explores the implications for writing (and, by extension, reading) in the most metafictional story, "The Strange Case of X". Probably the most accurate thing I can say about the book is that it's clever. In fact, relentlessly clever, and not always in a good way. It starts off well enough, with a fairly straightforward story ("Dradin in Love") introducing the gritty and complex city. The writing is good, and there are all sorts of in-jokes (I presume I missed many). I found the story dragged a bit, though the ending was strong. The clerk, a rake of a lad with dirty brown hair and a face as subtle as mutton pie, winked wryly, smiled, and said, “I understand, sir, and I have precisely the book for you. It arrived a fortnight ago from the Ministry of Whimsy imprint—an Occidental publisher, sir. Please follow me.” Perhaps, there can be no truth in a story told by or in the first person, unless it is verified by the second person. They are experts at the art of cataloguing passion, with this grave distinction: that when I say to you, sir, ‘passion,’ I mean the word in its most general sense, a sense that does not allow for intimacies of the kind that might strike the lady you wish to know better as too vulgar. It merely speaks to the general—the incorporeal, as one more highly witted than I might say. It shall not offend; rather, it shall lend to the gift-giver an aura of mystery that may prove permanently alluring.”

His elements are all more overtly connected to the theme of Ambergris, a city that doesn’t seem to be as developed as the modern world, but still doesn’t seem to resemble any city from the past, apart from aspects of the Byzantine Empire. I'm there again. There's something in it reminiscent of the moment after a car accident, where you're sitting in disbelief, trying to make sense of it, half laughing, half shaking your head. The Strange Case of Mr. X" is the last of the novellas from the original version of the book. This one is VERY funny, very weird, and also provides a much needed tonal change from "Martin Lake." It ends on a very strong note, and I was still very enthralled after finishing this novella. Jeff VanderMeer is a very clever, very talented guy. But I feel that sometimes, he lets his cleverness get in the way of a good story. The most obvious marker, at first glance, is the self-awareness of the text, what the kids these days call 'meta'--where not only are you writing, you're also commenting on the fact that you're writing, making jokes and references, reminding the reader of the artificiality of what they are reading.One of the things I like most about fiction is the concept of world building. To create an alternate reality so captivating & fully realized that it not only feels like a real place, but a place almost preferable to reality. It's why I've been drawn to fantasy & sci-fi writing, it's why I'm such a huge D&D nerd & it's certainly a part of why I love video games. Worlds like Ed Greenwood's Faerûn, Terry Pratchet's Discworld, William Gibson's Sprawl & video games like the Suikoden series are places where my mind has often wandered & wondered what it would be like to actually live within them. I'm sure I'm not alone here & this collection of short stories of VanderMeer's Ambergris only proves that.