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A review by naokamiya
The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco, Harry O. Morris
4.0
Exactly the type of weird fantasy energy I've been craving lately, it has a similar sense of seemingly endlessly flourishing idiosyncratic worldbuilding and imagination as a Mieville or a Barker but in structure and development is much more properly strange in terms of the uncanny sensations it conjures, making it land somewhere between kitchen sink dark fantasy and off-kilter bizarro fiction in the realm of a Ligotti or a Schulz. Kinda unfurls like a psychedelic weird-horror magical realism, imagery and sensations coalescing over each other like a kaleidoscope of drugged out genre fiction mechanisms entwining within one another effortlessly. Smoothly crafted with beautiful prose that unfolds like a river of language while avoiding direct indulgence in tropes while skirting juuuuuust close enough to their edges that it satisfies both my literary and fantasy loving sides alike, this definitely felt like a novel tailor made for my tastes.
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."