Catherynne M. Valente is a poet and literary critic. You can see her other works and read and listen to excerpts at Catherynne Valente's website.
The Orphan's Tales:
2006 Winner of the Tiptree Award, 2007 World Fantasy Award nominee. Here's the Orphan's Tales website.
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The Orphan's Tales — (2006-2007) Publisher: A Book of Wonders for Grown-Up Readers.
Every once in a great while a book comes along that reminds us of the magic spell that stories can
cast over us–to dazzle, entertain, and enlighten. Welcome to the Arabian Nights for our time–a lush and fantastical epic guaranteed to spirit you away from the very first page….
Secreted away in a garden, a lonely girl spins stories to warm a curious prince: peculiar feats and unspeakable fates that loop through each other and back again to meet in the tapestry of her voice. Inked on her eyelids, each twisting, tattooed tale is a piece in the puzzle of the girl’s own hidden history. And what tales she tells! Tales of shape-shifting witches and wild horsewomen, heron kings and beast princesses, snake gods, dog monks, and living stars–each story more strange and fantastic than the one that came before. From ill-tempered “mermaid” to fastidious Beast, nothing is ever quite what it seems in these ever-shifting tales — even, and especially, their teller. Adorned with illustrations by the legendary Michael Kaluta, Valente’s enchanting lyrical fantasy offers a breathtaking reinvention of the untold myths and dark fairy tales that shape our dreams. And just when you think you’ve come to the end, you realize the adventure has only begun…
The Orphan's Tales
I haven't read any fantasy quite like Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales duology. This is the story of a young orphan girl who is shunned because of the dark smudges that appeared on her eyelids when she was a baby. She lives alone in a sultan's garden because people think she's a demon and nobody will claim her. However, one of the young sons of the sultan, a curious fellow, finds her in the garden and asks her about her dark eyes. She explains that there are wonderful stories written on her eyelids and that a spirit has told her she must read and tell the stories; Then the spirit will return and judge her. The prince loves stories, he begs her to tell him one, and so she begins.
The rest of In the Night Garden and its sequel In the Cities of Coin and Spice is a collection of nested stories that are interspersed with short interactions between the young prince and the girl with the dark eyes (somewhat like The Arabian Nights). These stories are all connected to each other, but each is unique and highly imaginative. There are fascinating creatures — many based on myths and fairy tales — like a monopod, two griffins, a necromancer, a wicked papess, an otter king, a woman with three breasts, three brothers with dog heads who become accidental cannibals, a leucrotta, a Magyr, a skin seller, living stars fallen to earth ... and these are just some of those that I can describe in a few words (and I'm not giving them justice). The characters in The Orphan's Tales remind me of the Cantina Scene in Star Wars. The darker characters, (e.g., the wizard and the necromancer), are particularly excellent. Ms Valente's imagination for bizarre characters and plots exceeds Lewis Carroll's and she never lets up. Each story is brilliant and brilliantly told.
And the prose is truly beautiful:
He was very tall, and thin as a length of paper. His skin and cloaks were the color of the moon — not the romantic lover's moon, but the true lunar geography I had heard whispered by Sun-and-Moon Nurians come to buy glass for their strange sky-spying tools: gray and pockmarked, full of secret craters, frigid peaks, and blasted expanses. His eyes had no color in them save for a pinpoint pupil like a spindle's wound — the rest was pure, milky white. He passed three solid gold pieces over my mother's palm, and she shuddered in revulsion at his touch when the money changed hands. She handed me over eagerly, examining the coins like a fat pig snuffling at its supper slop.
This gave me chills:
My mother had kept silent as a nun since the day my sister was taken from her. I was an infant when she vanished from us; I never knew that sister. But her absence stalked the house like a hungry dog. The hole where she had been took up space at our dinner table, it sagged and slumped in the musty air, it ate and drank and breathed down all of our necks... I grew up alone in that silent house with nothing but the stinking cows and my mute mother and the hole. Even my father didn't want to spend his days there; he stayed in the fields directing hay-rolling and goat-breeding until it was dark enough to slip back inside the house without anyone bothering him. But still, the hole answered the bell when he rang, and he had to scurry to bed with his head down to avoid looking it in the eye.
There are many more of these gorgeous passages to enjoy. My only complaint about the writing itself is that there are dozens of characters in The Orphan's Tales and they ALL talk like that. So, it's not very realistic, but I suppose realism wasn't exactly what Ms Valente, a poet, was going for.
One other small complaint I have is that because the stories of The Orphan's Tales seem at first to be random and unrelated, it's hard to feel deeply involved with many of the characters because they don't stick around for long (except for the orphan and the sultan's son who don't do much but talk and listen). But, again, that's the point, because we learn at the end of In the Cities of Coin and Spice that all of the strange stories and characters actually contribute to, and explain, the history of the orphan girl. Perhaps that's a bit of a spoiler, but you'll enjoy the stories more if you realize that it's all going somewhere. And, besides, you're a clever reader, and you'll probably figure out that there's got to be something going on here besides just a bunch of beautifully-written, highly imaginative, unconnected stories.
But, the main reason I'm telling you this is because I know you'll
get more out of your reading if you follow the advice I'm going to give you... Just trust me:
Get yourself a pencil, a pad of paper, and a fine cup of caffeinated coffee (in my experience, a Starbucks Venti Latte works best). Sit down with In the Night Garden and read the first few pages up to the point where the girl starts to tell "the first tale I was able to read, from the crease of my left eyelid." This first story is about Prince Leander. Write "Prince Leander" at the bottom of your paper. Prince Leander runs into a gray-haired tattooed "crone" and a few pages later, she starts to tell her story. Write "crone," or whatever you want to call her, above Prince Leander's name. Soon, "crone" starts telling the story that her grandmother told her. Write "crone's grandmother" above her name. I'm including here a picture of my notes for the second half of In the Night Garden. (Feel free to use them if you can read my handwriting.) As you see, things get complicated. This is not the kind of book you can leave for a few days and come back to unless you have notes to tell you who was talking to who. Or unless you're a lot smarter than me, which is certainly possible.
Highly recommended for the reader who appreciates beautiful prose, is willing to take notes, and is looking for something original. —Kat Hooper
In the Night Garden
The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden is the first in a two-book (maybe more?) series and if book one is any guide, this is as delicious and clever a tale-telling as one is likely to run into for some time. With an Arabian Nights feel and structure, we’re introduced to one engrossing story after another as the demon-girl of the garden (that’s the Sultan’s garden of course) spins them out to the enraptured young prince who disobeys orders and decorum to listen. But that’s far too simple a description, for the tales that emanate from the girl’s mouth come themselves from the mouths of the characters in each succeeding story, one after the other, as the main character from story A meets another character who regales him/her with their story (Story B), including the story he/she/it heard from someone else (Story C), including the story they heard ... and on it goes, so that the stories open up like Russian dolls, nesting one inside the other. But even that is too simple a description, for some of the same characters parade across these successive stories, the same myths, the same lands — some in major roles, some in bit parts — so that while each single story unfolds, so too does a larger tale, a larger sense of beauty and mystery and horror and bravery and all the things one hopes for in a fairy tale or myth. And all the while we cycle back to the girl and the prince as their own story continues in real time.
This is a rich, lush, full work that simply blossoms before your eyes like some time-lapse video of a growing flower.
There is more creativity here than I’ve seen in a long time. Her characters could easily have all morphed into one single blob of fairy-tale types, but each stands out individually and sharply. The stories too could have blurred one into the other in cliché fairy tale fashion, but each has their own pace, their own tone, their own vivid setting, their own startling imagery, with the one exception being that the prose style itself tends to similarity in all of them.
Some may find it overly lush or ornate, but while it would be easy to find such an example or two, the problem, such as it is, is more than outweighed by the sheer beauty of the prose, whether Valente is describing a human character, a gryphon, a barnacle-encrusted pirate ship, or a fabled city of many towers.
I can’t recommend the book highly enough and would also recommend, due to the interlocking nature of the stories, that one reads it relatively quickly; otherwise you may miss those points of connection, forgetting characters’ names or relationships, etc. As well, I’d recommend not waiting too long to pick up book two, for the same reason plus because In the Night Garden ends quite abruptly and, well, you just won’t want it to.
Highly recommended — something I’d consider a must-read. —Bill Capossere
A Dirge for Prester John — (2010-2012) Publisher: This is the story of a place that never was: the kingdom of Prester John, the utopia described by an anonymous, twelfth-century document which captured the imagination of the medieval world and drove hundreds of lost souls to seek out its secrets, inspiring explorers, missionaries, and kings for centuries. But what if it were all true? What if there was such a place, and a poor, broken priest once stumbled past its borders, discovering, not a Christian paradise, but a country where everything is possible, immortality is easily had, and the Western world is nothing but a dim and distant dream?
Brother Hiob of Luzerne, on missionary work in the Himalayan wilderness on the eve of the eighteenth century, discovers a village guarding a miraculous tree whose branches sprout books instead of fruit. These strange books chronicle the history of the kingdom of Prester John, and Hiob becomes obsessed with the tales they tell. The Habitation of the Blessed recounts the fragmented narratives found within these living volumes, revealing the life of a priest named John, and his rise to power in this country of impossible richness. John's tale weaves together with the confessions of his wife Hagia, a blemmye — a headless creature who carried her face on her chest — as well as the tender, jeweled nursery stories of Imtithal, nanny to the royal family. Hugo and World Fantasy award nominee Catherynne M. Valente reimagines the legends of Prester John in this stunning tour de force.
Forthcoming:
Book 3
The Habitation of the Blessed
[Note: I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version of The Habitation of the Blessed read by Ralph Lister. It took me a while to adjust since I have recently listened to Lister read three installments of The Gorean Saga and I at first had a hard time hearing the priest Prester John instead of the sadistic misogynist Tarl Cabot. But I got over this soon enough and thought that Mr. Lister did a great job with this one.]
In The Habitation of the Blessed, Catherynne M. Valente lets her extravagant imagination loose on the 12th century legends of Prester John, the Nestorian Christian priest who set out from Constantinople to search for the tomb of Saint Thomas and ends up as the beloved ruler of Pentexore. This is an ancient land of strange, nearly immortal, creatures who’ve never heard of Jesus Christ and who practice the Abir, a lottery which reassigns them to new lives, jobs, and mates every three hundred years. The Abir staves off boredom, keeps them from being forever ruled by a despot, and allows ambitious folks a chance to be ruler, though it often causes feelings of sadness, loss, and envy, too.
When Brother Hiob von Luzern goes looking for Prester John (who left Constantinople a few hundred years ago and sent his famous letter to the Pope) and finds himself in Pentexore, he’s allowed to pluck and read three books that are growing from a tree as if they were fruit. One book is John’s account of his search for Saint Thomas and his experiences in Pentexore:
I could not think where I had beached myself. It was as though every story I had ever heard had broken itself on the shores of this place like blind brittle whales and I walked among their shards that could never be made whole again.
The other books were written by a blemmye and a panoti who became close to John. Unfortunately, just like fruit, the books begin to rot, so Hiob decides to alternately copy a chapter from each, hoping to acquire as much information as possible before they disintegrate. Thus, similar to the connected story devices used in some of Catherynne Valente’s other novels, The Habitation of the Blessed is told as four separate intertwining narratives in which we learn about Prester John and the Pentexorians he meets, medieval Roman Catholic Christianity, and the fascinating cultural practices of Pentexore.
If you’ve read Catherynne Valente before, you’ll already have recognized that the Prester John Legends are perfect source material and you won’t be surprised to learn that this tale is full of the kinds of wonderful visual imagery and dreamy ideas that inhabit her other work. She brings a whole new life to the Fountain of Youth, the Gates of Alexander, and the Garden of Eden. Her account of the Tower of Babel is chillingly awesome and made me wish I was talented enough to paint it. In The Habitation of the Blessed you’ll meet gryphons, pygmies, troglodytes, lamia, a sea of sand, warmongering Cranes, and trees that grow maps, diagrams, books, beds, sheep heads, and equipment for medieval warfare. Each of these wonders is lovingly described and packed with personality.
Prester John’s interaction with those he meets is often gently humorous as he subjects these lost (but immortal) souls to Sunday School lessons and sermons about the trinity and transubstantiation and has them conjugate Latin verbs, say Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and pray the rosary. So far, John is learning a lot more about his faith than his students are, but his wide-eyed bewilderment and good-hearted intentions make him a lovable figure. Even Brother Hiob, who’s scandalized by John’s congress with these demons, is a likable character.
The writing is luxuriant, as always, and the dialogue is often reminiscent of the delightful repartee found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I couldn’t help but laugh at the peacock historian who, after the most recent Abir, was assigned to be a fiction writer. He laments that now he has to make up ridiculous stuff that never happened and must work with motifs, metaphors, and themes (“What rot!”).
Also, as usual for a Valente novel, there are plenty of interesting ideas to chew on. As Hiob the monk reads the three books, he experiences the same crises of faith that John and Thomas suffered previously. Is Pentexore the Garden of Eden? Prester John seems to think so when he says “This is the country God kept for men before we fell,” yet if Pentexore is paradise, there would be no need for the Abir. Do nearly immortal creatures need redemption? Would we really want to be immortal on Earth? What does the land of Pentexore, a rich and sensual place, mean for the faith of medieval Christian monks? Did God intend for His followers to take vows of poverty and chastity and to withdraw from society or does He mean for us to experience and engage with the magnificent things He’s made? If God has given souls to those we consider monsters, how are we to treat these monsters? And, if we were wrong about the monsters, where else may we have misjudged God? —Kat Hooper
The Habitation of the Blessed
If, in The Habitation of the Blessed, Catherynne Valente had only invented the wild and amazing world of the fictional “three kingdoms” of Prester John, the mythical priest-king of the east, she would be a rock star. If she had created the kingdoms and used them to provide a critique of colonialism with prose that is by turns lyrical, concrete, incisive, lucid and funny, she’d be a queen of words. But to do that and create the powerful, dreamlike image of trees that bear books as fruit, you’d have to be a goddess, and that’s what Valente is: a prose goddess.
The Habitation of the Blessed is the first book of a three-book series called A DIRGE FOR PRESTER JOHN. In my opinion, there are probably three writers on the North American continent who could do justice to the legend of Prester John: John Crowley, Margaret Atwood and Catherynne Valente, and Valente has tackled it head-on in this rich, phantasmagorical tale.
At the end of the seventeenth century, a group of monks travels in search of the kingdom of Prester John, a mythical Christian kingdom ruled by a priest king. Prester John is a folktale whose origins are traced to a series of letters sent to various rulers in the middle twelfth century. Prester John’s letters speak of a land of wonderful creatures, fabulous riches, and a fountain that bestows eternal life.
In a remote village in Pakistan the monks meet a strange and powerful woman. She takes the leader of them, Brother Hiod, to a tree where books hang like ripe fruit. The woman allows Hiod to pick only three books. He chooses at random, but of course the volumes aren’t random at all. Like ripe fruit, the books begin to rot almost immediately. Hiod decides to transcribe a section from each of the books in turn, so that he copies as much of each book as he can before it decays. It is no coincidence that the three books, each written by different authors, unfold the story of the Nestorian monk named John. One was written by John himself, and one by his wife. The third book is a collection of nursery tales, but the tales explain about life in this land, and the lottery, the Abir, that occurs every three hundred years.
The interwoven narratives interact with the seventeenth century monks, creating a layered and nuanced story of wonder, ambition, jealousy and love. Hagia, John’s wife, scribe and author in her own right, was born in the land of Pentexore. Hagia is not human. She is one of the races who populated this land, immigrating, according to the nursery tales, in a Ship of Bones. Her shape is that of a headless woman with her face carried on her torso. John thinks she is a demon (although he is surprisingly comfortable with her two friends, the red talking lion and the gryphon, because he can rationalize them as being Christian symbols). In Hagia’s narrative, she shares with us her first pilgrimage to the Fountain, a visit all residents of her land make three times. They drink from the water and become immortal.
This world is full of other wonders, though. Anything planted in the earth sprouts a living replica: not just books, but cannonballs, sheep and even people. The land is bordered by an ocean of sand; not a desert, but a crashing, storming ocean of sand. In the distant mountains, a wall made of diamonds holds back the kingdom’s powerful and fearsome enemies, two brothers who are the opposite of life, or at least that’s what the tales all say.
The book is not just a tour of a fabled land. John brings his shuttered beliefs into this place and is determined to turn it into a Christian land, a reversal of the Garden of Eden tale (and he compares Pentexore to Eden on more than one occasion). In developing John’s reaction to Hagia, Valente riffs beautifully on the biblical phrase, “The woman tempted me.” Faced with innocent questions about his beliefs by the gryphon Fortunatus, John reacts to the inconsistencies revealed in his religion by clamping down more tightly, and insists on teaching the Pentexoreans Latin prayers. The locals find the Latin classes entertaining, but the seeds of tragedy are planted early, and in this fertile soil, everything that is buried grows.
The Habitation of the Blessed is filled with glorious sentences, whether it is Brother Hiog describing the scent of the fruit books as “apples steeped in brandy,” or a pamphlet calling Lent “the Season of Eating in Secret.” The trinket Hagia gets as a child, her first trip to the Fountain, the revelation of the fountain (so different from what anyone would expect, yet so plausible), the amethyst pillars of Al-Qasr; these details pulled me deeper into the story with each page.
The book is not perfect. I have to wonder for example, how a pregnancy affects Hagia’s ability to eat or talk. It’s not completely clear to me why seventeenth-century monks would still be obsessed with Prester John, who must have been considered a fable by that time. I also don’t completely understand what motivates Fortunatus to help John at the end of the book, unless, unlike Hagia, he thinks the priest is harmless.
And do any of these questions matter? They do not. Valente’s commitment to storytelling and exquisite prose is a good match for her education in the classics. I will snatch up the copy of The Folded World, the second book in the series, and hurl myself into it as soon as I possibly can, because I want to know what happened, not only to the hapless Nestorian priest turned king, but to the immortal Hagia and even to Brother Hiod, who has entered into a new phase of his journey of discovery. I can’t wait to spend more time with Hagia, Fortunatus, Hajii, the lion Hadulph, and the other fabulous beings who people Valente’s fertile kingdom. —Marion Deeds
The Folded World
Prester John has been king in Pentexore for many years now, aided by his wife Hagia the blemmye. He loves the creatures he rules and has spent his time teaching them about Jesus Christ and trying to reconcile the creation story in Genesis with his new knowledge of the world. When one of John’s daughters brings a letter from Constantinople, asking John to bring his army of monsters to fight the Muslims in Jerusalem, he decides that they’ll go. Although he is happy with his new life in Pentexore, he is still a faithful Christian and he feels that it’s his duty to clear the sacred city of infidels.
The creatures of Pentexore, though they claim to be Christians to please their beloved King John, think the whole Christianity thing is a game involving silly hand motions and recitations. When they agree to fight on John's side, they have no idea what they’re in for. To them, war means “mating and keening” and they don’t understand the ancient battle between the Christians, descendants of Abraham’s son Isaac, and the Muslims, descendants of Abraham’s first but illegitimate son Ishmael. When they cross the wall into John’s world, they are shocked at the treatment they receive and the way humans treat each other.
The Folded World is similar in structure to the first novel in Catherynne M. Valente’s PRESTER JOHN series — a monk is alternately copying chapters from three different books (written by Hagia, Vyala the White Lion, and the explorer John Mandeville) and desperately trying to transcribe them before they rot. All the while, he tends to the dying Brother Hiob and attempts to understand what Pentexore means for his own faith.
The greatest impact of The Folded World comes not from its ideas about creation, salvation, eschatology, or faith, but from Catherynne Valente’s powerful presentation of every creature’s struggle to understand the world, its beauty and terror, and his own place in it. I cannot think of another author who can fill one book with so many thoughtful ideas so beautifully spoken:
Love is a practice. It is a yogic stance; it is lying upon nails; it is walking over coals, or water. It comes naturally to no one, though that is a great secret. One who is learned might say: does not a babe in her mother’s arms love? From her first breath does she not know how to love as surely as her mouth can find the breast? And I would respond: have you ever met a child? A cub may find the breast but not latch upon it, she may bite her mother, or become sick with her milk. So too, the utter dependence of a tiny and helpless thing upon those who feed and warm her is not love. It is fierce and needful; it has a power all its own and that power is terrible, but it is not love. Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language — and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.
If love were not all of this, I would not have devoted my mind, which is large and generous and certainly could have done much else, to it for all these centuries.
If love were not all of this, I would never have known that wretched, radiant little girl, nor let her learn her teeth on my heart, which children can find with more sureness than ever they could clasp the breast, and latch upon it, and bite, and become sick, and make ill, and all the worst of the six ails of loving, which are to lose it, to find it, to break it, to outlive it, to vanish inside it, and to see it through to the end.
The entire book is like this — beautiful nuggets of wisdom on every page.
I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version, which is dynamically read by Ralph Lister who is convincing in all of his human and monster roles. He does a great job and I’ll be reading the third volume of PRESTER JOHN in this format.
The Folded World is highly recommended, but it’s not what you need when you want to read an action-packed adventure story. Save this for when you’re in a pensive and vulnerable mood. It’s incredibly gorgeous. —Kat Hooper
The Folded World
The Folded World is the second book of Catherynne Valente’sDIRGE FOR PRESTER JOHN series. In Volume Two, much has changed. In the seventeenth century, Hiog is no longer transcribing the books that fall from trees like fruit. His apprentice, Alaric, is. In Pentaxore, Prester John’s wife Hagia and the crane-girl, Anglitora, who is John’s daughter, are in hiding in the land of the cranes, while Hagia describes what happened when, at John’s urging, the Pentaxoreans left their home and went to war.
In the other half of Pentaxore, beyond the diamond Wall of Alisaunder, another explorer named John appears. John Mandeville is a rascal, a vagabond, a thief and storyteller, who has stumbled into a world even his active imagination could not have conjured. The book has two princesses: Anglitora, and Selafet, the daughter of John and Hagia, a strange, tormented jigsaw-puzzle of a child who plays a crucial role in the events that unfold in The Folded World.
The theme of the book is twins, mirrors, reflections; thus there are two princesses and two foreigners named John, and two versions of the war, millennia past, that led to the building of the Wall of Alisaunder. The book is about reflection, both in the sense of an image bounced back to you from a shiny surface and the insight that comes from looking within.
Prester John, responding to a letter from a Christian king asking for troops to help defend Jerusalem, mounts an army and sails across the Rimal, a sea of sand. Since Pentaxore is ruled by the Abir, a great lottery held every three hundred years, John uses a lottery to choose his warrior companions. So many of his friends or companions are “chosen” to accompany him that Hagia cannot help but harbor doubts that John fixed the lottery, since it would not be the first time he has cheated. For those who remain behind, including the white lion Vyala and Selafet, John gives an assignment of breathtaking hubris: go to the ruins of the Tower of Babel and build a cathedral there, to be dedicated to St. Thomas the Twin.
Despite a battle to fight and a cathedral to build, despite the reader’s first view of the world beyond the wall, The Folded World is somehow a slower and quieter book than Habitation of the Blessed. It may be that the wonders of Pentaxore are familiar now, but even John Mandeville’s discoveries on the other side of Pentaxore are not so strange. Every page of the book is still beautiful, filled with dreamlike images and precise, glorious prose. Mandeville is a witty raconteur who can’t quite keep sadness, remorse and horror from his writings, even though he tries. The monk Alaric struggles with his desire for women, as Hiog struggled with, and succumbed to, his gluttony. Alaric’s censure of females — he calls the white lion Vyala a “slattern” for her beliefs about love — are undermined, perfectly, by the lyrical descriptions of women he’s glimpsed in his past.
I shuddered and flushed all together, and I felt as I did once long ago, when a girl came to my window all bright with the night, her eyes full of stars, her lips dark and trembling with the January cold and the nearness of sin.
Hagia has the most difficult story to tell, as the army of Pentaxore reaches our world, and encounters a monastery of Nestorian monks. John is a Nestorian and he is torn between his love of Pentaxore and his desire for the familiarity of the monastery. I found this to be the only unsuccessful part of the book; John’s struggle seemed more pathetic than poignant. Of course it is told through the filter of his perceptive, skeptical, and slightly jealous wife. Hagia must also confront her own attraction to another mortal man, a reflection of the man John could have been.
Selafet’s story was the most compelling to me. Whether it is her dreams of the leashed hounds circling an ancient pillar, her growing relationship with Vyala, or the startling, cataclysmic action she takes at the end of the book, her story pulled me along. The discovery of her special tree brought tears to my eyes. Valente echoes this perfectly in a scene later in the book, where, after the battle, Hagia and her comrades begin to bury their dead in the sterile earth of our world, because they don’t completely understand yet that trees in our world are not like the trees in theirs.
Whichever narrative is spooling out, paragraph by paragraph the book is lyrical, funny or shocking, and sometimes all of the above. Valente understands that to make the surreal accessible it has to be grounded, and she gives us perfectly chosen details that do that.
She also uses this book to play with the conventions of narrative, so Mandeville’s story is written like an encyclopedia, because John tells us that he sees books as tyrants, demanding you read them in a certain order, and his story you can open at any page. Selafet’s narrative takes different prose forms too, and even Hagia’s memoir interfaces with the editorial comments of Anglitora, who reads over her shoulder as she writes. In Habitation of the Blessed, Hiog’s three books stood alone, although they connected with their readers; the three stories that Alaric and the others transcribe interact with the world, inform and are informed by other works, other stories.
This is all very literary. You can choose to read this series as a literary treatise on the evolution of stories; a critique of imperialism; a commentary on the power and danger of belief systems. You can explore the power of feminism or discuss deconstructionism. Valente writes in as many layers as anyone would want, but first and foremost, the reader can just let go and be swept into a glorious tale of a strange and magical kingdom and the people who live there. —Marion Deeds
Stand-alone novels:
The Labyrinth — (2004) Publisher: Here Monsters are hidden... A lyrical anti-quest through a conscious maze without center, borders, or escape — a dark pilgrim's progress through a landscape of vicious Angels, plague houses, crocodile-prophets, tragic chess-sets, and the mind of an unraveling woman, driven on by the mocking guide who seeks to destroy as much as save. Enter the world of the Labyrinth, where Doors do not wait to be opened, but hunt you in the night. This is Zarathustra in Wonderland, a puzzle which defies solution, a twisted path through language and madness... But where will you hide?
Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams — (2005) Publisher: In the mind of Ayako, an old woman in exile on a mountain in medieval Japan, nothing is certain, and nothing holds a familiar shape for long. This is a map of a psyche exalted and destroyed by solitude, and on its contorted surface Shinto philosophy, Greek mathematics, Hawaiian goddesses, Egyptian legend, quantum physics, and Babylonian myth meet and merge... In Catherynne M. Valente's second novel since the critically acclaimed The Labyrinth, language and myth construct a strange new geography of the self. This is The Book of Dreams: open it and walk the shadowy paths of this extraordinary landscape.
The Grass-Cutting Sword — (2006) Publisher: The Grass-Cutting Sword explores the strange landscape of primeval Japan, from the Heaven-Spanning Bridge to the hellish Root-Country: the troubled trickster Susanoo-no-Mikoto, god of wind and storms, is banished from heaven and wanders the earth, lost in human form, in search of his demonic mother and charged with the defeat of an eight-headed serpent.
The Grass-Cutting Sword
The Grass-Cutting Sword is a metaphor, comprised almost entirely of exquisite imagery, and every single word has obviously been chosen with a poet’s eye for sound and sight. It is a creation myth and a Grendel for the nuclear age, a story of beginnings and endings, of beauty and hideousness. The images Catherynne M. Valente chooses in The Grass-Cutting Sword will haunt your nightmares and inform your dreams. Close your eyes, for instance, and envision the monster of the tale from this excerpt of its self-description:
I am Eight. We are Eight. Lying on my side, if you prefer the symbolism. Eight heads, eight tails, eight snakes susurring against each other like auto-asphyxiating lovers, joined at the torso — circus grotesque, unseparated octuplets in a jar of formaldehyde, jumbled trunk a snaggletoothed muscle with the brawn of a circus strongman, and all the bells ringing, ringing in the gloam. Eight-all-together rattle eight diamond heads, heavy and flat, a clutch of serpent-castanets, and oh, the music I-and-we make, music for the maidens, music for the midden we made of our caves, music for the bones, the old rolled bones, rooster bones and buffalo bones and fox bones and tigress bones, bones like bellows and bones like cudgels, bones like whistles and bones like pillows.
Not a creature you’d like to come across on a dark night. Not even a creature you’d like to confront on the brightest day, armed to the teeth.
The Grass-Cutting Sword is a retelling of the Japanese creation myth, beginning with Izanami and Izanagicoming from nothing and procreating to produce the earth and all of its lands. While creation is a violent act, it proceeds apace until Izanami gives birth to fire and burned to cinders, ultimately transformed into the underearth itself. Izanami, not content with creation as it stands, follows after his sister/wife, and she nearly suffocates him with dirt, fungi, the detritus of the earth-beneath-the-earth. Izanami survives, and gives birth to three children when he cleans the dirt, flesh and blood from himself upon returning to the world: Ama-Terasu, the sun, Tsuki-Yomi, the moon, and Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the god of the sea and storms. While the sun and the moon come from Izanami’s eyes, Susanoo is hawked from his father’s nose, like snot, and he feels this insult deeply.
Susanoo is expelled from the heavenly realm and comes to earth in the form of a human after a quarrel with the sun. He alone of his mother’s children grieves for her, and he resolves to find her. When he arrives on earth, however, and is first adjusting to his human body, a mourning couple recognizes him and asks him to rescue their eighth daughter, Kushinada, “whose hair was dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, whose skin was pale as new-sewn silk!” She has been stolen by a beast with eight heads — a beast that has already swallowed their other seven daughters. The couple promises Kushinada to Susanoo as his wife if he can effect her rescue.
And so the tale is set in motion. The narrative is told in two parts: Susanoo’s tale of his history and his quest, and the tale of the sisters and the serpent. It seems that while the serpent swallows the sisters, it does more than digest them; it incorporates them, and it grows to be them. One is hard-pressed to wholly hate this monster, just as one may well find it difficult to feel much admiration for Susanoo as a hero, for the actions and emotions and thoughts of all are complex. The rescue of a fair maiden from the clutches of a monster is not as it seems. And soon we find we have traveled from the beginning of time to the ending of the first age of humanity; we have arrived at Hiroshima.
I did not expect this book to be what it is. I began to read it as if it were a story, like any I might expect to find in a standard anthology, a straightforward narrative. I quickly found that I could not read it that way. This book requires and rewards a concentrated, thoughtful reading, one that revels in every word, one that sees the colors and hears the sounds. Do not stint yourself on time when you read this beautiful book. Luxuriate in it. Wallow in it. Let yourself be lost in its glories. It is exquisite.
—Terry Weyna
Palimpsest — (2009) From the Author's Website: There is a city you have never heard of. It is a city of dreams and flesh, of night-terrors and exaltation. It is a city that exists as a virus, passed from person to person, on skin and on bone, streets and alleys and factories and orchestral halls crawling and thriving, infinitesimally small, on the bodies of those who have been touched by Palimpsest. And once you have entered this place, once you have tasted it, you will do anything to get back.
Palimpsest
The first thing that strikes you about Palimpsest is the gorgeous prose. Every sentence is crafted with the utmost care, resulting in a novel that almost reads like poetry. It simply begs to be read out loud. I've read many books that attempt this kind of lush prose, but Palimpsest is one of the most successful and most beautiful.
Palimpsest is a sexually transmitted city. People who have been there have a small tattoo — a piece of the city's map — somewhere on their body. Sleep with them, and you are transported there. When you wake up, back in the real world, you will find a small tattoo of another part of Palimpsest on your body — and you will want to go back.
The story follows four people who are all newcomers to Palimpsest — a young Japanese woman, a beekeeper, a locksmith, a bookbinder. They all have lost something in the real world and are naturally drawn to Palimpsest. As the story progresses, more and more details about their lives, and about the strange city of Palimpsest, are revealed. While the novel, at first, seems like four more or less independent stories told in alternating chapters, slowly but surely a plot develops that connects everything and leads to a beautiful, bittersweet conclusion.
An interesting aspect of the novel is its strained eroticism. After the initial "connections" that introduce the four protagonists to Palimpsest, they find themselves wanting to return, which can only be done by sleeping with another "infected" person. The resulting scenes are almost uncomfortable to read — while they're at times fairly explicit, the sex is mainly a mode of transportation, something you have to get through.
Palimpsest is a novel to read slowly and savor, because it'll just be over all too soon. I found myself rereading entire chapters after turning the last page. I would recommend this without hesitation to fans of China Mieville, but also to anyone else who appreciates a slow-moving, lyrical, and entirely unique story. Absolutely gorgeous.
[This is Bill's review of the audio version of Palimpsest. His earlier review of the print version is below.]
Catherynne Valente writes more poetry than prose, even in her ostensibly prose novels. The language teems with metaphor and simile, with rich sound quality and lush imagery even as it also employs poetry’s concision and elision.
With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that Brilliance Audio's version of the book, narrated by Aasne Vigesaa, is absolutely fantastic. It’s even possible, and this is something I don’t believe I’ve ever even considered, let alone stated, that the audio version might even in some ways be a better “reading” experience. Vigesaa wraps her tongue round the rhythms and lushness of language, rising and falling in tone and volume and emphasis so that one is drawn, perhaps, even more fully into the realm of Palimpest. And one of my complaints in my review of the print version (below), that too many of the characters speak in the “arch-poetic” style, becomes less of a flaw and more of a strength in the audio version.
Because of the generally dulcet or melancholy or elegiac tone, and the density and richness of language, this is an audiobook that truly needs to be listened to, not simply heard. It isn’t something to put on while you’re cooking or running that quick 10-minute errand in the car. It’s the kind of audio you wish you could pop in and then drive for long distances across a relatively empty landscape (despite its urban setting), say, across the red rocks of Utah or the flat isolation of the Dakotas.
I wouldn’t give up reading the book for the audio because I loved lingering over some of the lines and passages in Palimpsest, but I would happily read the book, then “reread” it via audio for the enhanced experience. —Bill Capossere
Palimpsest
Palimpsest, by Catherynne Valente, adds to the growing list of urban fantasy books whose setting isn’t mere background but plays a major role in the story. Valente brings the same lushly poetic style and sense of myth and fairytale that characterized The Orphan's Tales, creating a more abstract and surrealistic version all her own. As well, rather than do a simple job of world-creating, she also plays with a more traditional staple of fantasy — the other world some lucky few in our own get to enter, whether it be via a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, a magical book, or some other rare portal.
The eponymous city, Palimpsest, is reached not through any of these randomly benevolent and neutral “doorways” but instead through sex; the doorway to Palimpsest is basically an STD, and like some STD’s, it leaves its mark, in this case a map of a small portion of the city on the body, like a tattoo. Have sex with someone “infected,” and during the sleep afterward you’ll be carried into that part of Palimpsest that appears on your partner’s skin. You can only explore that section, however; to move beyond it you must find another “carrier,” who will most likely be happy to run into you, as you now carry your own personal map somewhere on your body — a new place for them as well.
Your first time in the city, you are “quartered”— you enter a sort of customs’ house room with three other tourists who become connected to you before entering their appropriate section: you don’t know them, they may be half-a-world away in our world, and you may never see them again here or there. But they play an important role, as they are the means of permanently emigrating to Palimpsest.
The novel is multi-stranded via a seemingly omniscient narrator who can enter places usually off-limits. We follow four visitors: Amaya Sei is a ticket-seller in Japan’s rail system who has an obsession with trains and also must deal with the memories of her dead mother. November Aguilar is a beekeeper who lives near San Francisco, close to where her dead father is buried. Ludovico Conti lives in Rome with his wife Lucia who helps him publish small-run, often specialized, books until she leaves him. The final member of the quartered group is Oleg Sadakov, a Russian immigrant locksmith in New York City who is haunted by his drowned sister.
It doesn’t take much to see the connection between them of loss and grief; all are lonely, unhappy individuals. They become the typical “small band” often found in these sorts of portal stories — the children of Edward Eager, C.S. Lewis, or Madeline L’Engle — and several of the usual roles are played out: the determined leader, the frightened one, the lost one. As is often the case, the group has some sort of action their newly-discovered land requires of them to be saved.
But, as the sexual doorway clearly indicates, this is not a children’s tale. And the “quest” is not the usual drop a ring into a volcano, defeat the Dark Lord quest. It is slowly, tantalizing revealed and is nowhere near as simplistic or fantasy-mundane.
The story moves back and forth between each character’s experiences in our world and in Palimpsest, and they eventually intertwine. Each character’s story in Palimpsest opens up with our omniscient narrator introducing us to a new section of the city, almost as a guidebook does.
And what is the city like? Strange. Beautiful. Dangerous. Enticing. Mundanely urban. Phantasmagoric. Bosch meets Gormenghast meets Narnia meets Prague. Trains are alive and wild (commuters have to literally “catch” them) and long to fly but bees are made in factories. Houses grow like a child and other houses sometimes have to pack up and stroll away grumbling when one decides to expand. Inhabitants have shark heads, giraffe necks, cloven feet. Somewhere a cartographer “places her latest map on the windowsill like a fresh pie and slowly, as it cools, it opens along its own creases, its corners like wings, and takes halting flight ... it has papery eyes, inky feathers, vellum claws.” Elsewhere, “Zarzaparrilla Street is paved with old coats. Layer after layer of fine corduroy and felt and wool ... and [people] must navigate with pole and gondola, ever so gently thrusting aside the sleeves and lapels and weedy ties, fluttering like seaweed, [carrying] great curving pairs of scissors in case of sudden disaster.”
Everywhere are wonders, but there is also the usual urban fare: shops and noise and transport and hoity-toity restaurants and schools for the upper class and a financial district and fountains, etc. And there are dangers — gangs and groups opposed to tourists or immigrants. And there are veterans of a war whose important purpose and scale is only slowly revealed.
So how does Palimpsest succeed as a novel? It is lushly, often densely, poetic — an arch formal sort of style — rich in simile, metaphor, and imagery. This is both blessing and curse. Blessing just for the sheer pleasure of so much of the language — Valente’s poetry background shines through clearly and, given free reign in terms of fantastical subject matter, it sometimes takes your breath away. Curse because I thought the story too uniformly such. Not only are the descriptive passages of Palimpsest the city so poetic, but so are the descriptions of the characters and our world and, more problematically in my view, so is the speech. The characters too often spoke like poets and while I could make an argument that only a certain sort find their way to Palimpsest, I really couldn’t buy that. I wanted more differentiation in voice and style. This is more of a problem in the first half than the second, where we spend more time in Palimpsest itself and also where plot speeds up a bit to distract somewhat from style.
I also though the sexual aspect came too easily or quickly to the characters, especially when the sex is other than what one of the characters would consider “normal.” We’re told at times that the decision to have sex to get back to the city is troublesome, but it never feels that way. Nor did I feel the addictive nature was quite fully nailed down. It relied a bit too much on the reader trusting that Valente’s beautiful linguistic descriptions made it obvious why people would be so desperate to return, but that felt a bit too abstract and distant and too much a “built-in” reason rather than an organic one.
The characters’ needs also feel “built-in” — unhappy as they are, the desire to emigrate to Palimpsest is almost a no-brainer — what are they giving up here after all? I would have liked to have seen someone who would actually be faced with giving up a life of contentment or even happiness, or someone with a family. And their inevitable coming together happened too easily.
In general, I thought the first half of the book was less successful than the second half, once we start spending more time in Palimpsest. At that point the book began to win me over and by the end I was reading it ravenously. Some will be disappointed that it ends too soon or abruptly. It isn’t an ending that resolves itself fully — the characters and the city are still growing and changing — we’ve seen only the beginning of a few choices and what the ripples of those choices will be is left for us to ponder; Valente isn’t giving them up.
Palimpsest didn’t blow me away as did The Orphan's Tales, but in some ways it pulled me in deeper. So, highly recommended, with strong encouragement to, if you’re struggling, try and reach that halfway point and see if it starts to also win you over. —Bill Capossere
Under in the Mere — (2009) Publisher:The second release from the Electrum Novella Series, Under in the Mere, takes Arthurian legend to the furthest limits of the imagination. Incantatory, labrynthine, and both playful and heartbreaking, Under in the Mere is a major new work from one of America's premier writers of fantasy. With full interior illustrations from renowned fantasy artist James Owen and Jeremy Owen. Actually, Rabid Transit Press could put a piece of clip art here to somehow represent the artistic wonders that will reside in this book, but it would do the illustrations no justice. So, trust us, it will be amazing.
Under in the Mere
Catherynne Valente’s novella Under in the Mere is about as inaccessible a book as I’ve read in some time. That doesn’t mean I’m not recommending it, but it’s fair warning to any who attempt it. Under in the Mere is a poetic, surrealistic “retelling” of several Arthurian tales (a mix of the better and lesser known ones), although “retelling” is really far too pedestrian and prosaic a term for Valente’s dense, imagistic and poetic language here, and far too limiting with regard to how she plays with the tales and with language. Perhaps “recreation” is a better description.
Here’s a short taste of the language from the opening of the first story, involving the Lady of the Lake:
Perhaps I am nothing but a white arm. Perhaps the body which is me diffuses at the water’s surface into nothing but light, light and wetness and blue. Maybe I am nothing but samite, pregnant with silver, and out of those sleeves comes endless swords, dropping like lakelight from my hems. Will you come down to me and discover if my body continues below the rippling?
I thought not.
Look out: the lake’s edges blur into the sky, blue into blue. All water flows into itself — this is the lake; this is the sea. River and shore and flux, we are all water together, and the moon shows in one just as in the other, a wide white face and a long white arm.
This opening is a relatively easy passage to follow in comparison to what is to come. To be utterly honest, there were times, sometimes several paragraphs in a row, where I had no idea what was actually happening or being said. Just as honestly, I have to admit I was seldom bothered by this. Under in the Mere, I found, is as happily experienced as it is read. At those points where “story” disappeared for me, I was just as happy to be carried along by language or by voice (each story narrated by a different character — The Lady in the Lake, Galahad, the Fool, etc.).
Actually, “carried along” implies a sense of movement and that’s probably an overstatement, implying more of a sense of structural and narrative grounding than I had at those times. Being “submerged” in the language is probably a better way of putting it; its abstraction and surreal nature is kind of like floating in a muddy lake — you can’t tell exactly where you are or which way you’re facing, but you have the general gist of the place and the sensation is not at all unpleasant as the water buoys you up. At least, not unpleasant unless you really want to know exactly where you are; in that case, the experience is probably a bit maddening. Those looking for clarity of plot should best avoid Under in the Mere.
Or those looking for faithfulness to time and place. Valente doesn’t shy away from anachronisms in her recreation. Characters sometimes speak in modern dialect or reference modern tools. And throughout the work the land of Faery, of Avalon, is linked to California — a “modernization” which I thought absolutely worked: California has always been both the land of paradise and promise (sun and Hollywood and fruit and work and high tech) as well as the land of Other (Hollywood and “liberals” and “gays” and earthquakes and facelifts).
As with any collection, the stories vary in their effectiveness, though personal opinion may differ depending on where one’s taste falls between utterly surreal poetic abstraction and clear-as-rain narrative. Several are quite powerfully moving, especially “The Fool,” “The Lovers (the story of Balin and Balan),” and “The World (the story of Bedivere).”
There is a lot here to drink in here — the language, the imagery, the way Valente plays with storytelling tropes:
I begin to think there is a plexus of these fairy women, a chain, a net, knotted by hundreds of hands in hundreds of towers. They must spread out like veins, collecting each other’s daughters, waiting for a chance to escape the pattern...
Note the poetic auditory connections here as well, the assonance /consonance /alliteration /rhyme and near-rhyme: “fairy”—“chain”, “chain” to “net” to “knotted”, “knotted to hundreds to hands”, “must” with “hundred”, “out” with “tower”, “chains” and “veins”, etc. Note the issues of sexuality and power and storytelling and myth.
Under in the Mere is a book that I believe will stand multiple readings and give you something new each time. It can be a maddening book, a frustrating book, an arcane and obscure and opaque book, but I’d have to say it’s a rewarding book for those who don’t mind being lost in the woods now and then.
Valente’s sometime-inaccessibility is given good service by her brevity. The entire work is less than 140 pages, including illustrations and white space, and the stories average around 10 pages each. The sense of being lost as to what is happening, therefore, doesn’t last very long. Give the first story a shot and if you think you can stand the sense of displacement, fall under its spell under in the mere.
—Bill Capossere
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making — (2011) Young adult. Publisher: Twelve-year-old September lives in Omaha, and used to have an ordinary life, until her father went to war and her mother went to work. One day, September is met at her kitchen window by a Green Wind (taking the form of a gentleman in a green jacket), who invites her on an adventure, implying that her help is needed in Fairyland. The new Marquess is unpredictable and fickle, and also not much older than September. Only September can retrieve a talisman the Marquess wants from the enchanted woods, and if she doesn’t... then the Marquess will make life impossible for the inhabitants of Fairyland. September is already making new friends, including a book-loving Wyvern and a mysterious boy named Saturday. With exquisite illustrations by acclaimed artist Ana Juan, Fairyland lives up to the sensation it created when the author first posted it online. For readers of all ages who love the charm of Alice in Wonderland and the soul of The Golden Compass, here is a reading experience unto itself: unforgettable, and so very beautiful.
Most of this book can be read online.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making
September’s father has gone off to war and her mother works all day building airplane engines while September stays home and washes the china teacups. Life in Omaha is disappointingly dull for such an imaginative and adventurous (and heartless!) 12-year old girl... until the day September looks out the kitchen window to see the Green Wind perched on his flying leopard and beckoning her to Fairyland.
There are many wonders to see in Fairyland: witches, werewolves, fairies, flying bicycles, animated furniture, spriggans, glashtyn, marids, a fabric city, a golem molded from soap, and a red wyverary (a wyvern whose father is a municipal library). If you have read Catherynne Valente before, you can imagine the kinds of wonderful creatures you’ll meet in The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making... or, actually, maybe you can’t!)
But all is not as it should be in Fairyland. The Marquess, who’s only a child, is quite the little tyrant, and she’s got a job for September. During her quest, September explores Fairyland and learns a lot about courage, honor, friendship, and love.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is Catherynne Valente’s first young adult novel and, as Valente fans will expect, it’s gorgeous in every way. The story is fun and the characters and plot will appeal to children, but this book goes far beyond most modern children’s fantasy literature. It’s most comparable to Alice in Wonderland; Like Lewis Carroll’s classic, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is intelligent, beautifully written, packed with imagination, and full of thoughtful and charming ideas (often pointed out by the delightfully intrusive narrator) that give depth and charisma and make this children’s story more than easily-forgotten entertainment:
All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.)
Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. That is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.
As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Dr. Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.
I listened to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making on audio (Brilliance Audio). It was read by Ms. Valente herself and, though she is not a voice actor and didn’t give each character a unique and distinguishable voice, she was quite pleasant. I like hearing an author interpret her own work as long as she has an agreeable voice and prosody, which Ms. Valente does. My only issue with the audio version is that I missed Ana Juan’s lovely art that introduces each chapter in the print version. Oh, audiobook publishers, why can’t we have the art, too?
—Kat Hooper
Deathless — (2011) Publisher: Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century. Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei’s beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation.
Deathless
CLASSIFICATION: Weaving together fairy tales and history, Deathless is kind of like Pan's Labyrinth, if it was told by Hayao Miyazaki and Neil Gaiman. Highly recommended for fans of adult fairy tales, Russian folklore, and Catherynne M. Valente.
FORMAT/INFO: Deathless is 352 pages long divided over a Prologue, 6 Parts, and 30 numbered/titled chapters. Narration is in the third-person, mostly via the protagonist, Marya Morevna. Deathless is self-contained. March 29, 2011 marks the North American Hardcover publication of Deathless via Tor. Cover artwork is provided by Beth White.
ANALYSIS: As a fan of fairy tales and mythology from around the world, I loved Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales, which I consider a modern day classic. So when I heard the author was putting her unique stamp on Russian folklore in her latest novel, Deathless, I couldn’t wait to get a copy...
Presented mostly in the form of a fairy tale, Deathless is the story of Marya Morevna, the fourth oldest and fourth prettiest daughter who, at “sixteen years of age, with seventeen’s shadow hanging heavy on her every tear”, meets Koschei the Deathless, who whisks her away to his home in Buyan in the Country of Life. Now, I’m no expert on Russian folklore — in fact, apart from Baba Yaga, I have very little familiarity with Slavic mythology — but from what I could gather from researching Koschei online, Deathless remains fairly true to the original tales including Koschei’s death hidden from his body, birds turning into men who marry Marya’s sisters, an Ivan who steals Marya away from Koschei, a role played by Baba Yaga, and Koschei’s fated demise.
Of course, there are plenty of deviations, like Koschei depicted as a tragic hero rather than an evil villain; the historical setting, which includes Leningrad during World War II; Ivan and Marya not being brother and sister; and the war between the Tsar of Life and the Tsar of Death. Even with all of the changes made to the original tales however, Valente manages to keep her novel firmly rooted in Slavic mythology as evidenced by the appearances of domovoi (house imps), leshy (forest imps), vila, rusalka, firebirds, Likho, Viy, Gamayun and more. At the same time, Valente’s boundless imagination is on full display. Among the more inventive material in the novel are a rifle imp and a factory where girls who never age weave lifeless cloth soldiers for battle against the Tsar of Death.
Personally, what I loved most about Deathless was the fairy tale aspect, specifically the author’s frequent use of the “rule of three”: the three birds who turn into men and marry Marya’s three older sisters; the three tasks that Marya must perform in order to gain Baba Yaga’s approval to marry Koschei; the three chyerti friends who aid Marya with her tasks; the three gifts Marya receives from her sisters when she and Ivan are fleeing the Country of Life; and so on. Even when Catherynne M. Valente is not employing the rule of three, most of Deathless still possesses a charming fairy tale-like quality that accounts for much of the novel’s irresistible appeal.
Unfortunately, from the moment the story shifts to Leningrad at the start of Part Four until the book’s conclusion, it felt like I was reading a different novel altogether. The subject matter became darker and more depressing, the pacing waned, and the fairy tale qualities were less enchanting. To top it off, the ambiguous ending was hardly the payoff that I was expecting. Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against fairy tales with dark themes, adult content or unhappy endings — on the contrary, I enjoy such tales very much — but in this case, the last three Parts of Deathless just didn’t fit with the rest of the book.
While I may have had issues with the direction and tone of the novel’s final three Parts, I have nothing but praise for Catherynne M. Valente’s writing. Between her evocative and melodic prose, vivid imagination, a genuine passion for the material and bold vision, Valente’s performance in Deathless was a joy to experience, and one of the main reasons to read the novel:
Chyerti — that’s us, demons and devils, small and big — are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change — a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever. That’s how you get deathless volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.
CONCLUSION: If not for faltering towards the end, Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless could have been another masterpiece like The Orphan’s Tales. Even so, Deathless is still a special novel, one that will no doubt garner award recognition while continuing to expand Valente’s audience and her reputation as a master storyteller. —Robert Thompson
Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels — (2011) Publisher: Live the Myth! New York Times best-seller Catherynne M. Valente is the single most compelling voice to emerge in fantasy fiction in decades. Collected here for the first time, her early short novels explore, deconstruct, and ultimately explode the seminal myths of both East and West, casting them in ways you''ve never read before and may never read again. The Labyrinth — a woman wanderer, a Maze like no other, a Monkey and a Minotaur and a world full of secrets leading down to the Center of it All. Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams — an aged woman named Ayako lives in medieval Japan, but dreams in mythical worlds that beggar the imagination... including our own modern world. The Grass-Cutting Sword — when a hero challenges a great and evil serpent, who speaks for the snake? In this version of a myth from the ancient chronicle Kojiki, the serpent speaks for himself. Under in the Mere — Arthur and Lancelot, Mordred and le Fay. The saga has been told a thousand times, but never in the poetic polyphony of this novella, a story far deeper than it is long.
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