Optimus Yarnspinner inherits an unpublished manuscript and sets off to track down the unknown author, who disappeared into Bookholm--the City of Dreaming Books. He falls under the spell of the book-obsessed metropolis, where one can find many charming attractions: priceless signed first editions, salivating literary agents, and for-hire critics. But as Yarnspinner delves deeper, the darker side of Bookholm emerges--cold-blooded book hunters, cyclopean Fearsome Booklings, sharp-toothed Animatomes, and the Shadow King. Will ...
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Optimus Yarnspinner inherits an unpublished manuscript and sets off to track down the unknown author, who disappeared into Bookholm--the City of Dreaming Books. He falls under the spell of the book-obsessed metropolis, where one can find many charming attractions: priceless signed first editions, salivating literary agents, and for-hire critics. But as Yarnspinner delves deeper, the darker side of Bookholm emerges--cold-blooded book hunters, cyclopean Fearsome Booklings, sharp-toothed Animatomes, and the Shadow King. Will Yarnspinner survive in this world where reading is a genuine adventure?
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This book is stunningly imaginative and breathtakingly brave. Moers brings his readers on an adventure to an exotic book-tropolis known as "Bookholm"--a place more frightening than we might expect. Trapped in the head of the main character--a lizard--we endure what he endures, hope what he hopes, and fear what he (most justifiably) fears, as he searches for the author of a perfect manuscript. That we manage to find such kinship in a mythical lizard professes Moers's ability to spin reality out of fiction and to translate the fantasy-based into the prosaic.
While some of the backstories become a bit long and overly detailed, the reader will reap great benefits later, as the author ties up all of his loose threads. Each digression deserves its own novella; each digression adds a new layer of history, myth, and reality to Moers's fictional creation.
Overall, this book is tremendously rewarding upon finish. For readers, writers, and those who are merely alive, Walter Moer's 'The City of Dreaming Books' shows what it's like to face a challenge, feel despair, but ultimately succeed--even if you're constantly pursued by a shadow more than metaphorical.
Polymath
Jan 23, 2008
Strange Again
It's hard to figure out how to describe this book. I tried to explain to my fiance - "it's very strange and I'm not sure if I like it entirely, but I can't put it down."
What on earth can one make of a statement like that? The trouble, I think, is that the characters look like distant cousins of Dr. Seuss, (and I must admit the pictures are part of what got me started with this book and with the 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear), but this is not really a kids' book. The author too well describes the horrible things that happen to characters in the book for it to be bed-time reading from parent to kid. These often charming, sometimes horrifying characters are meant for adults, as are some of the looong descriptions (in this book, especially of music) that seem almost drug-related. In that the plot is driven by a manuscript, and follows around readers and writers and pieces of books (that he has mostly made up), it reminds me a bit of Italo Calvino's if on a winter's night a traveler.
This is a world where books and writing are highly valued (a cousin of Jasper Fford's world, but the world looks a lot less like ours). The hero is a bookworm (of the saurian variety) who, in search of the writer of a mysterious but utterly perfect manuscript (about writer's block), gets into all sorts of trouble and adventure. Involved are cute mini book-reading cyclops, live books, catacombs, and antiquarian book-shop owners.
Was the book good? Yes. I wish he wouldn't spend quite so much time on description. Sometimes it seems like a pause from the book, or rather an interlude, and I just wanted to see what happened next. I like the world he creates, and the puns he uses when naming some of his characters.
