The Bitter Quill

EDITOR’S NOTE: Another contribution from Catherynne M. Valente’s blog Goblin Market, syndicated here for your pleasure. Waitasec… giant squid? Sentient fungi? Where do I sign up?

A quick plug here and a promise to get to the meat of Goblin Market as soon as possible–deadlines have eaten my life and rock stars have kidnapped my son.

But I love this book so much that I just have to link to its final and triumphant wide release–in a new Bantam paperback. The story of how COSAM came to be is rather harrowing–not to be read by those just starting out in the literary world, as it will freeze your young blood right in your veins. Thus, all banners and trumpets to this final incarnation!

This is something like a review, but really, it’s a love letter to Vandermeer’s marvelous, frightening, beautiful creation: the great city of Ambergris. I pretend no objectivity. This book has a permanent place on my recommendation list.

Dear Ambergris:

Not only have you the greatest city-name since Truth-or-Consequences, New Mexico, but you are ruled by an abiding terror of squid and mushrooms, and that makes you dear.

Since I first ventured–hesitantly? Well, yes, there is, after all, the river-squid, and rarely in literature do giant squid bode well for nubile young maidens such as myself–into you, I have been confronted by marvels at every turn, not the least of which being the inversion, perversion, and glorification of history itself, and the deconstruction of deconstruction. Is there anything your streets and alleys cannot encompass? I think not. From Martin Lake’s paintings and his secret revealed, to the grey caps (yes, dear Reader, these are ravenous anthropomorphic mushrooms, and that should be enough right there to lure you past the tentacled river) and the horrifying Silence–whose secrets I am literally dying to know–to the truly delightful Hoegbotton Guide to your admittedly checkered past, which has few secrets besides the cause of its author’s indigestion, there is enough in Ambergris to exhaust a lifetime’s curiosity.

As long as you bring your cryptographer’s manual, a bathing suit, and make sure to be in tow for the Festival–I hear it’s a hoot.

I love you, Ambergris. But please don’t touch me like that–I might not survive it if you loved me back.

Love,
CMV

EDITOR’S NOTE: As promised, here is the first post syndicated from Catherynne M. Valente’s writing blog, Goblin Market. If you’re not familiar with Cat or her work, you’re doing yourself a disservice. I urge you to visit her website and cool your heels a while. It’s well worth becoming acquainted with — and not coincidentally, so is she.

A little while back I spirited a copy of Lud-in-the-Mist away from a friend’s bookshelf, curiosity piqued by that by now very old meme about Neil Gaiman referring to it in his blurb for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I had no idea what to expect, beyond knowing some vague trivia about Ms. Mirrlees herself and that it was, assumedly, somehow quintessentially British, since Gaiman had disqualified The Lord of the Rings (there’s no real reason for me to link to that, is there?) as the “finest English novel of the fantastic” until Jonathan Strange, as it was not, strictly speaking, an English novel about England. Or something.1

All that meta-commentary aside, Lud is, in short, an extraordinary book. If Lord of the Rings is the big, bombastic Grandfather of modern fantasy, Lud is obviously the quiet, unassuming Grandma who showed everyone how to grow wild mint out back and jitterbug in the kitchen. In fact, given that Mirrlees published in 1926, some time before Dr. T’s opus, I would not be at all surprised if the Shire was full of Granny Hope’s patented mint.2. Look carefully at any work of fantasy in which urban worldbuilding, provincial farmlife, idyllic villages, or fanciful names figure largely, and you’ll see Mirrlees’ ghost peeping through the pages. She could even be called the mother of interstitial literature, since Lud combines the fantasy genre with horror and of all things, procedural crime drama and political philosophy.

It is, however, one of the most deeply strange and alien books I have ever read, and what’s more, it sucker-punches the reader with that Otherness right at the end, after a long, meandering narrative, that, much like the river Dapple, turns and wanders around the land of Lud without much hurry at all. The tidy, measured style is not at all dated, and the descriptions of the turn of the seasons, village life, and the flora and fauna of everyday are truly transcendant–even leaving aside the unsettling and eerie landscape of Fairyland itself. But for me, the novel, while charming, would have been a failure without its disturbing and marvelous conclusion.

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Well, this is exciting news! The incomparable Catherynne M. Valente, author and poet, whose beauty and talent are rivalled only by each other, has graciously allowed The Bitter Quill to syndicate* the content of her new writing blog, Goblin Market. The technical details are still being worked out, but what it amounts to is that (relatively) soon after something goes up over there, you’ll see it go up over here. Isn’t that fantastic? If I were a Muppet, I’d be waving my arms spastically over my head and making high-pitched hooting noises.

It may or may not be important to note that not everything that appears on Goblin Market will necessarily appear on The Bitter Quill. I don’t see the value in reproducing any administrivia or the like, as we’ve got plenty enough of our own, thank you. But any posts of substance and interest — and I haven’t seen Ms. Valente write much that wasn’t both — will be faithfully reproduced.

*Very much like stealing, only with permission.