Reviews

The soldiers who spend months on end there among the coats themselves end up looking more like coats than people, and their thinking is more like the thinking of coats (for instance, they spend hours on end thinking about a city, where there are houses, monuments and streetlights on springs, and through whose streets there walks a solitary pony).

This book is absolutely as strange as I could possibly hope a book to be, and yet entirely comprehensible and with a strong plot and message. A+, will be reading it again and again in the future.

nwhyte's review against another edition

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1.0

Someone recommended this to me months ago, a surreal reimagining of Prague as a city with a mystical twin space linked to it. I found it dull and incoherent. China Mieville did it much better in "The City & the City". At least it is short.

littlesprite21's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

s00pmonster's review

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challenging mysterious reflective slow-paced

Strong character development? No

3.0

Man, this book was....a lot. I read it because it's one of my best friend's favorite books and I think I would have rated it lower if it didn't remind me of him so much. The book is pretty incomprehensible, which is kind of the point, but it got so incomprehensible at times that I couldn't create any sort of image in my brain of what was going on, which was frustrating. It's definitely the kind of book where a single sentence can take up an entire page, so be ready for that.

There are some really interesting themes brought up throughout the book like how we inherently ignore spaces and objects that don't fit into our worldview, how defining something simultaneously limits it, and how uncomfortable humans are with existence without meaning. Those were the parts that I enjoyed the most and I could forgive a lot of the nonsensical, surreal events happening in the book purely because they underscored those themes.

However, the interesting philosophical tidbits here and there were not enough to make the overall experience very enjoyable. The writing is so dense and chaotic that it felt like I was slogging my way through a computer generated word dump at times, instead of prose that a human being wrote with any intention of being remotely intelligible. Nine times out of ten these moments happened whenever there was dialogue, so I got tired of seeing quotation marks ahead, knowing it was time to psych myself up to endure pages of utter nonsense.

When the writing is understandable, there are some really cool images the author evokes such as riding a bike past a gallery of paintings that turn into a stop-motion animation, hollow statues filled with phosphorescent fish, a library morphing into a jungle, and an endless bed that turns into a mountain you can ski down, but all in all, I'm not sure how I feel about the book and I'm not sure I'll ever know. If you want something to trip out on, go for it. If you want an actual story, don't bother.

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