2014 read #5: The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Habitation of the Blessed: A Dirge for Prester John Volume One by Catherynne M. Valente
270 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 14 to January 17
Rating:  ★★★★½ out of 5

Valente is the fantasy writer I aspire to be: prolific, in command of baroque, lush, lyrical prose, inspired by the odder and less-visited corners of history and centuries of folklore. She is easily one of my favorite authors of all time, possibly because her writing meshes so well with my own idiosyncrasies. I can't seem to win any converts to her writing, so maybe it really is just me.

This book, regardless of that, is astoundingly good.

Grotesque, erotic, soaked in the strange beauty of medieval Christian mysticism, luxuriously and voluptuously written, the tale of how Prester John (a figure of importance in medieval European folklore, if you aren't as obsessed with these things as I am) came to the "three Indies" intertwines four narratives, one by the 17th century monk transcribing them amid his own crises of faith and memory, three grown as fruits from a book-tree. Metafictional themes of books and storytelling, perhaps inevitably, inform and interlace all four narratives, but Valente's prose elevates such standard dime-store genre fare into delicate morsels of beauty:

I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened, it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere—the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible things, and made the world between them.

I feel something similar every time I take a book home, though I certainly never had the wherewithal to describe it so wonderfully.

I flirted with giving Habitation an unheard-of perfect five stars, but after sleeping on it, I decided to see whether the next volume, The Folded World, can bring everything to a satisfactory close. Some nagging presumption of disappointment makes me uneasy about The Folded World; I almost want to leave it unopened, full of possibility.