"the Silence rotted, molded, and eventually fossilised"
Past page 325 of Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen and the page-counting ceases.
Because the page numbers are no longer there.
A strange book perfumed with exotic scents, allusions to this world but harmless self-references to its own. It may have resembled Infernal Devices but I wouldn't know because I haven't /wouldn't read the latter. A book that talks as much about itself as its subject matter. A book where the author himself is a Creature, a thing of creation, the unknown 'X', as he calls himself in the embedded novella "The Curious Case of X", the unknown in an excruciatingly detailed quasi-steampunk other-world (or if one regards it from the other perspective in which New York and Chicago are as real as they are unreal to the baffled characters of this book, the only known thing among the unknown - unless of course one counts the deliberate fictionalisation of the author even within the bracketing realms of the Introduction and the author's own About page), one story among others in this star-scatter of stories populated by a hodgepodge of characters and genres. One moment a returning priest falls into ditches and falls in love, and the next, couched within a guide to art criticism is the life story of an artist invited to a beheading of a famous composer, a monumental event that changes his art irrevocably, haunting it at every corner of his paintings; the next one is confronted with an intricate monograph detailing the biological characteristics, facts and fiction, of the King Squid. It is a book about a world, really, rather than a world inside a book, a world that doesn't remain inside for very long. The prose is semi-archiac, but not too inscrutable as to resemble something two centuries removed from this particular one. Simpler than Victorian Era prose, but similar. It brings to my remembrance Susan Hill's own writings. The Small Hand. The Woman in Black. But dislocated from, and does not pretend to be part of, the idea of the traditional something, the traditional ghost story, the traditional novel. City is a Frankensteinian creature in its own flesh, an assembled tableau from an array of sometimes still-identifiable parts. But anyone can prune and cut and put together. The genius lies in the making, the bringing to life. The spark.
Reading on.
Because the page numbers are no longer there.
A strange book perfumed with exotic scents, allusions to this world but harmless self-references to its own. It may have resembled Infernal Devices but I wouldn't know because I haven't /wouldn't read the latter. A book that talks as much about itself as its subject matter. A book where the author himself is a Creature, a thing of creation, the unknown 'X', as he calls himself in the embedded novella "The Curious Case of X", the unknown in an excruciatingly detailed quasi-steampunk other-world (or if one regards it from the other perspective in which New York and Chicago are as real as they are unreal to the baffled characters of this book, the only known thing among the unknown - unless of course one counts the deliberate fictionalisation of the author even within the bracketing realms of the Introduction and the author's own About page), one story among others in this star-scatter of stories populated by a hodgepodge of characters and genres. One moment a returning priest falls into ditches and falls in love, and the next, couched within a guide to art criticism is the life story of an artist invited to a beheading of a famous composer, a monumental event that changes his art irrevocably, haunting it at every corner of his paintings; the next one is confronted with an intricate monograph detailing the biological characteristics, facts and fiction, of the King Squid. It is a book about a world, really, rather than a world inside a book, a world that doesn't remain inside for very long. The prose is semi-archiac, but not too inscrutable as to resemble something two centuries removed from this particular one. Simpler than Victorian Era prose, but similar. It brings to my remembrance Susan Hill's own writings. The Small Hand. The Woman in Black. But dislocated from, and does not pretend to be part of, the idea of the traditional something, the traditional ghost story, the traditional novel. City is a Frankensteinian creature in its own flesh, an assembled tableau from an array of sometimes still-identifiable parts. But anyone can prune and cut and put together. The genius lies in the making, the bringing to life. The spark.
Reading on.