A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
300 pages
Published 2013
Read from February 29 to March 12
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
Another month, another two-week gap in my reading schedule. This one began pardonably enough: another family health crisis and its concamitant worries, then a weekend trip, then a couple days that felt like the middle of May and left me distracted and lovelorn with thoughts of hiking, which made it impossible to sit still for long. Okay, so those excuses get progressively less convincing as the time period elapsed, but there was an additional culprit: A Stranger in Olondria itself.
I never feel so inadequate as a writer as when I sit down to articulate what I found so oxidizing, so chemically reactive, so insinuating in a book of unusual power. I see the blurbs on the covers and know that other writers have no shortage of words to convey how an exquisite book affects them, works its way into and through them, suggesting perhaps terms of praise and wonder in its passage. I don't want to recycle the thoughts and phrases of review writers, however apt they may be. Karen Joy Fowler snagged "Mesmerizing" right there on the front cover, Library Journal locked down "rich" and "strange," others snapped up "haunting" and "elegant" and "lavish." I suppose I'm free to toss in "An aching wonder of words, a lust all the more vivid for its propriety and slow insinuation, a knife of flowers and nearly unbearable moonlight, painless up until you find your heartstrings sweetly severed." But none of that feels quite right. A book, an excellent book, is a difficult beast to speak for. Oftentimes, I find I can only let it be, and observe it as best as I can. A book this dense, this laden and perfumed with imagery and ideas, a forest of mythology and a map of undiscovered heartache, sets its own pace. My ideal 100-150 pages a day pace can't survive a book like this. I'll start strong, my eyes a downhill race down the page, but then a scene or a myth recounted will force the book down, glaze my eyes over to give me room to think, to dwell, to rearrange. Olondria is a thoughtful, measured book, archaic and overgrown by design, piercingly current in its emotional momentum. I, at least, found myself unable to rush it.
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