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A review by beefmaster
The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco, Harry O. Morris
4.0
I've owned a copy of Cisco's Animal Money for a long time, but haven't got around to it or anything else by him thanks to his reputation as "difficult" or "impenetrable." The Divinity Student is his first novel, or perhaps more accurately, novella, and I'm intensely grateful that my local library, often not a bastion of Weird fiction, has three of his books in regular circulation! How divine! The Divinity Student might be described as surrealist fantasy, but I'm not convinced by this categorization. Yes, it's fantasy, if only in that the novel operates within the Fantastic (as per Todorov). I didn't find it that surreal and I suspect the word "surreal" has been exhausted of its specificity by overuse and liberal application. A more apt comparison might be to China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, fantasists working outside of the Tolkien hegemony. The eponymous divinity student has his blood replaced with words, scribbles on scraps of paper, and leaves the seminary for San Veneficio, a Spanish (?) town. He works for a word-finder, getting paid to produce ever more abstruse and obscure words. He finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy (though that word might be too dramatic for what this is) involving formaldehyde, divination by corpse, and a catalogue of forbidden words.
I found myself mostly unengaged by this work, I'm afraid to report. Partly due to its alienness and partly thanks to Cisco's elaborate writing. While his prose is often gorgeous, lush, evocative, it has a distancing effect. I never quite understood what was going as each sentence belabors, quite beautifully, whatever point or description it's going for. Similar to how in Moore's Jerusalem, when a character extinguishing a cigarette could take an entire paragraph, just having the divinity student do something quotidian turned into a baroque cathedral of words. An example, then. The divinity student has entered a laboratory wherein he will learn the secret of the formaldehyde:
Gorgeous writing, the kind I'm always drawn to, with multiple clauses, multiple adjectives, a multiplicity of words. Many of Cisco's choices for descriptors work so beautifully. I'd rather an excess of adjectives than a dearth; they are, after all, the spice of writing. I just wish I had been more invested in the narrative. Luckily, this is only 150 pages, a dense 150, but only 150. I look forward to reading more from Cisco.
I found myself mostly unengaged by this work, I'm afraid to report. Partly due to its alienness and partly thanks to Cisco's elaborate writing. While his prose is often gorgeous, lush, evocative, it has a distancing effect. I never quite understood what was going as each sentence belabors, quite beautifully, whatever point or description it's going for. Similar to how in Moore's Jerusalem, when a character extinguishing a cigarette could take an entire paragraph, just having the divinity student do something quotidian turned into a baroque cathedral of words. An example, then. The divinity student has entered a laboratory wherein he will learn the secret of the formaldehyde:
Magellan's familiar waves the Divinity Student to an empty chair and scuttles off to the wings—where racks of jars stand in static dust: later the familiar will tell his wife, "Today I saw a bottle containing a witch. A witches' ladder, a rope with cockfeathers woven in between the strands, throws curses. An impaled slug on a thorn, in a jaw, withered, colorless, still, in formaldehyde. Shelves of stuffed animals, motheaten, ragged, semicollapsed, dirty, glazed milky eyes. Flat glass slabs for the invertebrates—fish, eels, worms, phosphorescent. On every surface, tiny, neatly penned labels in precambrian ink, dark jumbles.
Gorgeous writing, the kind I'm always drawn to, with multiple clauses, multiple adjectives, a multiplicity of words. Many of Cisco's choices for descriptors work so beautifully. I'd rather an excess of adjectives than a dearth; they are, after all, the spice of writing. I just wish I had been more invested in the narrative. Luckily, this is only 150 pages, a dense 150, but only 150. I look forward to reading more from Cisco.