Helpful Score: 3
Palimpsest is urban fantasy by two of the three most common meanings for the phrase. Half of it is set in a contemporary urban setting -- four, actually, with Seis plot in Tokyo, Novembers in San Francisco, Olegs in New York, and Ludovicos in Rome and half is set in and completely and utterly about the fantastical city of Palimpsest. Its structure is convoluted -- though still simpler than the labyrinthine structure of Valentes previous work, the two-volumes of The Orphans Tales and its prose is dreamlike, distantly beautiful and gossamer-light despite the weight of metaphor attendant on every phrase. It is a work of beautiful yearnings, and clearly Ive been infected by it.
Its not the sort of book that is suited for a wide audience the prose is too poetic, the structure is too difficult, and the premise would earn it an NC-17 rating were this ever turned into a movie, even though most of the sex (and there is necessarily a lot of it) is practically fade-to-black. I didnt love it, despite being in its target audience (and having read Valente before), but I did admire the heck out of it and in retrospect I think it may have moved me deeply at the end.
But that question mark is why the book ultimately frustrated me. There was a great deal that I loved about the book. I loved how well Valente drew the four real-world cities and (more importantly) the strange isolated little burrows the four main characters inhabited in those cities; I loved even more the peculiar but very much character-reflective neighborhoods each of them inhabited in Palimpsest. I loved the city of Palimpsest itself, and the dark beauty Valente imbued it with; and deep down I got how it would be addictive. I even really enjoyed the structure, though I tend to have a better-than-average instinctive grasp of patterns, so I never once got lost.
But ultimately, even though I loved Valentes lyrical prose at the beginning of the novel, and even though I thought it absolutely the right sort of prose for a story of this sort, it distanced me from the muted tragedy inherent in the ending. One of the things I loved most about the previous Valente work I read (the two volumes of The Orphans Tales) was the way she wove joy and tragedy together in every page. She does the same thing in Palimpsest by the end, but I didnt feel either emotion until I thought about the story afterwards, and Im pretty sure that that disconnect was because of distance created by the prose.
As a flaw, thats a pretty minor one after all, I feel the emotion NOW but it is a flaw, and I wish with all my heart that I could have loved Palimpsest more.
Its not the sort of book that is suited for a wide audience the prose is too poetic, the structure is too difficult, and the premise would earn it an NC-17 rating were this ever turned into a movie, even though most of the sex (and there is necessarily a lot of it) is practically fade-to-black. I didnt love it, despite being in its target audience (and having read Valente before), but I did admire the heck out of it and in retrospect I think it may have moved me deeply at the end.
But that question mark is why the book ultimately frustrated me. There was a great deal that I loved about the book. I loved how well Valente drew the four real-world cities and (more importantly) the strange isolated little burrows the four main characters inhabited in those cities; I loved even more the peculiar but very much character-reflective neighborhoods each of them inhabited in Palimpsest. I loved the city of Palimpsest itself, and the dark beauty Valente imbued it with; and deep down I got how it would be addictive. I even really enjoyed the structure, though I tend to have a better-than-average instinctive grasp of patterns, so I never once got lost.
But ultimately, even though I loved Valentes lyrical prose at the beginning of the novel, and even though I thought it absolutely the right sort of prose for a story of this sort, it distanced me from the muted tragedy inherent in the ending. One of the things I loved most about the previous Valente work I read (the two volumes of The Orphans Tales) was the way she wove joy and tragedy together in every page. She does the same thing in Palimpsest by the end, but I didnt feel either emotion until I thought about the story afterwards, and Im pretty sure that that disconnect was because of distance created by the prose.
As a flaw, thats a pretty minor one after all, I feel the emotion NOW but it is a flaw, and I wish with all my heart that I could have loved Palimpsest more.
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