Palimpsest

There was a time, I think, that I would have loved this. When I was younger, more naïve, and much more pretentious. I would have nodded along with the overwrought descriptions and elaborate, strange settings like I knew what any of it meant. Makes me feel like as I've aged I've lost some of my coolness. More likely though I've just lost a lot patience.

It's all just so, I dunno, twee. A river made of coats, living kanji, a café where you have to crawl around on your knees. There's a fine line between unique and “You think you're so fucking clever, don't you?” This book is well over that line. There's a little bit of lamp-shading of that fact, where young visitors of Palimpsest seem to idealize it beyond its worth, not recognizing that there are many bad parts of it as well as good. I wish that was something that was played with a little more, in a more tongue-in-cheek way. Instead Valente provided a contrast to Oleg's young architect Gabriel, who thinks everything just has more “meaning” over there, with the broken and defeated Hester, who has only seen the worst of Palimpsest and it pretty much destroys her. For something that hipsters would probably like, this is not remotely ironic.

Valente creates an atmosphere that is built on sensuality and tragedy. There's a level of desperation in every act that's committed. I guess that's where the story's depth is supposed to come from. For the most part I either found it incomprehensible or depressing. I mean, I don't need every sex scene to be idealized or even to be sexy, but when every other chapter ends with an overwhelmingly pathetic conjoining of bodies it starts to wear on the soul. I was hoping for something a little more celebratory, not a story where people are reduced to gateways. That coupled with the very romantic and erotic prose, instead of amping up the sensual nature of the story, it kind of deadens the overall effect. It ceases to mean anything.

This all would have been fine though if it hadn't been for the way the characters were written. They were just completely inaccessible for the majority of the book. They come from different parts of the world and different circumstances, but their voices blended together in this amalgamation of lust and theatricality. One is obsessed with a religious icon, another with trains. One has been living with his dead sister since childhood, and the last made out with a swarm of bees. Yeah.

It was hard for me to get excited about their eventual union because I couldn't see what made them distinct. They were just these strange caricatures of human beings with absurdly heightened emotions. However, once they did start coming together they became much clearer as individuals and maybe even a tad more realistic. Of course, by then there was only about fifty pages left of the book.

Maybe YA has spoiled me, maybe it was a little too soon after my action-adventure kick to read something like this. Enjoying this book may require a bit of patience and openness that I just don't have.

Heady, lush, pretentious, calculatedly poetic, unrelentingly beautiful, blatant wish-fulfillment. Always just toeing (and occasionally crossing) the line of sheer ridiculousness, but somehow, it worked.

It was a little creepy how many symbols from my own personal mythology featured heavily: keys, trains, maps, lists, the City, the power of dreams. (Apparently I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake.)

Many many layers of metaphor. Sex as a method of exploration, a key that unlocks a part of the world you would otherwise never reach. Inner/outer worlds echoing each other, becoming interchangeable. Escapism in the truest sense.

Even now I'm not sure if I loved this book because it was actually good, or if it was just one of those trashy addictive things I loved despite its trashiness. At its best moments it was Borges or Gaiman, at its worst, Poppy Z. Brite. Either way I devoured it.

The world was amazing and her development of the characters quite skillful. The plot could have been tighter and I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending.