Re: FunSource & Elzorap's eBook Collection - Updated Daily.
by FunSource » Wed May 02, 2012 8:56 am 
The Folded World & The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente
Author(s): Catherynne M. Valente
Publisher:
Date: 2010-11-01 Format: pdf,rtf,epub,lit,lrf,mobi,fb2,pdb,txt,htmlz Language: English ISBN10: 0000000000
Pages: 352
In this fabulous land, Valente's rich prose shines with heretofore unsurpassed brilliance as she describes the fantastical sights of Pentexore, its capital city al-Qasr, and its outlying lands - the pygmies ever warring with the Crane-people, the gryphons, the lamia, the panotii and astomii and amycytrae with their huge ears and noses and mouths, and peoples stranger still. Longtime readers will not be surprised that these strange and perhaps grotesque medieval imaginings are, in Valente's narrative, some of the most compelling and sympathetic characters we meet. Her Prester John is as one might imagine the man would be from his Letter - arrogant, self-satisfied, hell-bent on conversion and domination, unable to fully grasp that the denizens of Pentexore are as fully people as the warring peoples of Constantinople from whom he fled, possessed perhaps of a good heart, but one covered over with assumptions and prejudices and dogmatic pronouncements. It is Hagia, the blemmy, who shows us the best and worst of John - and reminds us that, however much he might have thought so, this story is not his alone to tell, this country not his to claim, that his ideas of beauty and correctness and godliness are parasitic transplants in a land that had its own flourishing growths long before he crossed the sea and the desert, himself and the things he brought with him destined to irreversibly change that timeless place.
This is not to say that the novel leaves us no room to sympathize with John, who loved art in the days when the arguments over art in Constantinople were waged with weapons and rife with bloodshed, who in his long terror on the Rimal, the sea of stones, found room to venerate not just the churches and the saints of Byzantium and the cross he made from what little he had, but the scribes and the fish-sellers and a beautiful black-haired man, and the taste of quince. And Hiob, too - for all his old man's grumbling, his fear of heresy, his too-human complaints and prejudices and pride and petty greeds, he shines through as a lover of books, a man who would have liked to be a poet if he were not a priest, and by the end of the book I had found it in my heart to love him, to love them both despite their sins, real and imagined and overly-bemoaned in their narratives.
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