Opened a fantasy novel--poetry jumped out

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"From the balcony of my hotel room I looked down on garden parties, women in brilliant clothing laying tables among the oleanders, stout grandfathers bellowing for more wine, and children everywhere shrieking, trampling the marigolds, chasing one another. All the children held flexible wooden wands with tissue-paper birds attached to the ends, their gauzy feathers strengthened with copper wire; when the children played, these magical creatures trembled as if about to take flight for the trees, and at night they lay discarded on the lamplit grass."

I chose that page at random to demonstrate 2 things of which I am sure:

1) This books deserves to reach a much wider audience; and
2) I am not that audience.

Read any review of the book--read all of them, because they all say the same thing--and you'll know that the language of this book is beautiful. It is. Absolutely. (Not surprisingly, the author writes poetry as well.)

Here--another random passage: "The air was cold, the sea restless; the boat danced at the end of her tether like a foal. I breathed in great gulps of salt and darkness, and remembered buying a ticket to Ethendria long ago, in Bain. The memory lightened my heart; I was moving eastward at last, toward the angel's body. My path was a knot, full of loops and barriers, but freedom lay at the end of it, I was sure."

If that sells you on the book, you're the right audience. If you're thinking, yes, but what happens?--you're the wrong audience.

The path--a knot, full of loops and barriers--could describe the plot. It feels like he's going somewhere, and you feel you have a grip on things, but then it turns around and loops back, after pages of gorgeous description, in a knot of inaction. Something does happen, actually, but it's like watching a shadow puppet version of it, because so little is clear. The dreamlike, random, inexplicable events are paired with an almost complete lack of exposition. He does this; he experiences that; he eats a meal; he travels; he meets some people, who talk about certain matters; he is lost; he feels and remembers and dreams and fears.

What Jevick never does is make plans and try to carry them out with a purpose that makes sense to the reader--and it's told in first person. We have access to his thoughts. They're pure poetry, but they conceal more than they reveal. Everything must be inferred. (There are, of course, a few exceptions, such as when he carries his injured friend to safety, and the story the ghost tells. There are a few other moments in the story where you feel on safe ground. They don't really last.) He might be a bug crawling through the garden that you watch for a while, waiting to see if it does anything, or a bobber on a fishing line, swaying with the current, fooling you for a time into thinking something is happening.

Well, that's how I felt. I quit reading for about 2 years, and then decided I should try again. Maybe I was reading it wrong. I pushed through, so many pages a day, until I was done, and I thought, "That was very unsatisfying--but I think some people will like it."

If you are the type of reader that can be enchanted by language, and enjoy that aspect of literature more than plot or action, this is the fantasy novel you must read. For you I give this 5 stars. Make it 10. Why not?

If that's not you, you're not the audience for this book. And if you see the map at the front of the book, don't be tricked. It's not that kind of fantasy. For you, and me, I give it about 2 stars.

My imperfect math gives it 4 overall. It doesn't matter--either it's for you, or it isn't. But I genuinely hope this books finds its audience, because they will be very happy together. Truly.

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