City of Saints and Madmen
by Jeff VanderMeer
(Bantam Spectra,$14.00, 704 pages; trade paperback, published in February
2006.)
 Like
an invading fungus, Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen
keeps spreading and metamorphosing.
City of Saints and Madmen is a metafictional exploration of
the imagined city of Ambergris, a decaying, decadent metropolis where
strange fungi, irascible squid, and outré books are ubiquitous.
The two central pieces are "Dradin, in Love" and "The
Transformation of Martin Lake", two quietly melancholy novellas.
The others are mostly "found" texts -- a startling variety
of documents purportedly originating from Ambergris: tourist guides,
glossaries, chapbooks, excerpts from literary journals, etc. In these,
VanderMeer's weird deadpan wit is unleashed to wondrous effect.
The book first appeared in 2001 as a paperpack collection of four novellas.
The following year it re-emerged as a giant hardcover with a whole other
book's worth of extra material added to the subtly revised text. Subsequent
editions continued to be tweaked.
Along the way, two more items were added: "The Exchange"
(formerly a chapbook) and "Learning to Leave the Flesh", the
first Ambergris story. Every edition has been graced with a careful
attention to design: the book itself is an object in the author's metafictional
games.
VanderMeer's bizarre, obsessive creation is a fascinating mosaic of
interlocking texts whose meanings change as readers delve deeper into
the work and layers of imagination, humour, pathos, and metafictionality
are either stripped from or superimposed on texts encountered earlier
in the volume.
Key is "The Strange Case of X", in which readers encounter
a delusional author from the United States who claims to have created
Ambergris...
Originally published, in slightly different form, in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 8 April 2006.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
Elsewhere on the web:
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