Palimpsest: A Novel (vuoden 2009 painos)

I forced myself to finish this book. ( )

Not at all an easy read but so, so beautiful. Well worth the trouble. ( )

A palimpsest is a book or page which has the original writing scraped off to be used again, with a trace of the old left behind. The Palimpsest of the novel is a fantastical world arrived at from this world only by having sex with someone who has been. Once one has gone, a tattoo of a map of part of the city appears on their skin. Not as titillating as it sounds though once desperation builds to return and drastic measures are taken.

It is a very open ended novel. The character motivations are fuzzy. What is actually happening in Palimpsest is unclear at times. The beauty is in the descriptions of the city.

Palimpsest possesses two churches. They are identical in every way. They stand together, wrapping the street corner like a hinge. Seven white columns each, wound around with black characters that are not Cyrillic, but to the idle glance might seem so. Two peaked roofs of red lacquer and two stone horses with the heads of fork-tongued lizards stand guard on either side of each door. The ancient faithful built them with stones from the same quarry on the far eastern border of the city, pale green and dusty, each round and perfect as a ball. There is more mortar in the edifices than stones, mortar crushed from Casimira dragonflies donated by the vat, tufa dust, and mackerel tails. The pews are scrubbed and polished with lime oil, and each Thursday, parishioners share a communion of slivers of whale meat and cinnamon wine.

Valente must have been reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities when she wrote this novel. The dreamlike prose works to advantage though - what is real, what is imagined, is the city taking such a toll on these characters or are they torturing themselves. Much unanswered but an enjoyable read. ( )

Re-Read 2/28/20:

Imagine, just for a moment, that I recaptured all of the same glory, the beautiful prose, and the lost, wonderous FEELING that I got from reading Palimpsest the second time.

Imagine that it just got better with a re-read.

Especially now that I've read all the Fairyland books, this wonderfully adult and sexual version, along with all its myriad mini-tragedies, only deepens my appreciation of this book.


Original Review:

It is a reverence, a sting of the holy, as rich and powerful and desired as honey, and the book rolls on the tongues of paupers and kings alike, like fire, like hard cocks, like the welcoming embrace of a whole city. Indeed, this book is a love poem written by and scratched out by the city, itself, of Palimpsest, the fae kingdom of adulthood, of loss, abandonment, of scars and mutilations, of loveless sex and all the dirty waters of the world, of the ripe and blossoming heat of four who will finally make one, of the discourse of the bull and the serpent, and last, but not least, of all the maps of the universe, be they the eight-thousand door train or the touch of the third rail, be it the entire catalog of all animals, imagined or real, plastered across the soul, be it madness and the touch of the wet lady, or be it the thousand bees in the belly, this is a novel of such grand depth and squirming desire, that I am literally tongue-tied in tracing the map upon the skin.

Or, put a bit more simply, I liked this novel.

It was sadness given form, with just a hint of hope to flavor the flood of despair, of obsession and longing. It, like all of Valente's writing that I've had the immense joy of reading, has been so utterly well-read and well-crafted and so very deeply loved, never fails to amaze and shock and make me want to get on my knees and say, "I am not worthy."

There are a few technical things I'd like to say.

I've never read an author with such a confident use of semi-colons. She writes whole novels as if they were poetry. Indeed, the plot is never so easy to parse, and the very act of reading it requires nearly as much imagination as the author, just to make love to the words we read and fill it (or be filled) with a sense of completeness.

Never imagine that this is anything other than brilliant.

But then again, never imagine it is easy. This book is a lover that will show you all her dark secrets and then leave you as soon as she makes you hold her hair so that she may vomit over the side of your bed. ( )

Lovely work here, the kind of lyrical writing I seek to make for myself. Still, it took me a long time to read... and in fact, I believe it might have been this very style which slowed me down. So much of the book was inconsequential to the characters and plot (though not to the narrator, I guess!) Perhaps more focus on the mundane realities of the main characters could have helped situate the city clearer (given the "mundane" realities of the cast tend to be almost as strange as Palimpsest itself.)
Still, wonderful! ( )