2014 read #6: The Folded World by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Folded World: A Dirge for Prester John Volume Two by Catherynne M. Valente
252 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 17 to January 19
Rating:  ★★★★½ out of 5

Of the two, I would rate The Habitation of the Blessed a peg higher. With the exception of John Mandeville, one of the most delightfully unreliable narrators I've ever encountered, the narration of The Folded World seemed to lack spark. It was a neat trick to have a younger Hagia write down later events here, and an older Hagia write down earlier events in the first book, but Anglitora, even though she serves as a voice-over-the-shoulder arguing, commenting, and commiserating with the tale as it is written, never coheres as a distinct character. Vyala, the White Lion, as a substitute mother writing the tale of her charge's upbringing, never engages or bespells anything like Imtithal in the first book. Speaking of Imtithal and her charges -- and this might be a pretty big spoiler if you choose to read these books, so skip to the next paragraph if you wish -- there's kind of a blatant chronological error between the two volumes. In short, Imtithal's book on the tales she tells the three children is centuries, maybe a millennium old -- everyone in Pentexore grew up with the book, wishing Imtithal were their "butterfly" -- yet it ends mentioning "Houd, who died in Jerusalem." The Folded World has Houd dying in front of people who grew up reading the book in which he died. The nonlinear structure, winding in and around itself like a wild vine, is one of the delights of this series, which makes this slip-up (and I do insist it is a slip-up, and not a deliberate paradox or prophecy, because if it's meant as the latter, it doesn't work) all the more noticeable.

That said...

The ending of this book devastates. It strokes languid fingers -- the most skilled fingers, a writer's fingers, a liar's fingers, subtle fingers -- around the hard slippery knot of pain we all protect with our hearts, and then it twists and unravels that knot until the old bitter pain oozes out. The strength of Valente's writing, I think, is that underneath her occasional mawkish wallowings, her sentimentalist streak a mile deep, her tendency to get lost and maunder indefinitely along a limited set of themes and imagery, underneath it all is a beautiful, bruised, fragile yet brawny compassion and understanding of what it means to be human. Maybe this is my total unabashed fan-crush showing through, but I cannot read her better books without feeling that she gets it, she knows what it is to be human, to be loved, to need love, to hunger and crave and spoil things and kick dirt and shove and break and bite just to be noticed. Maybe this is a particularly white, Western, privileged vantage, but I grew up in a goddamn car and she still speaks right to my heart and, on her better days, plays my amygdala like a theremin.

These two books are what I wish the Fairyland books were like. The Fairyland series seems shoddy and slapdash now, a bunch of folklore thrown together for the sake of whimsy and showing off, without the heart and cohesion and bloody dirty lustful pain and mystery she tends here. I think of the next installment of the Fairyland series with preemptive, pre-publication disappointment.

I only wish I could write a fraction as powerfully as Valente, is all I'm saying.