Title: A Stranger in Olondria Author: Sofia Samatar
Published: April 24, 2013
Genre(s): Fantasy
Page Count: 299
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.
In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults. Yet even as the country shimmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of becoming free by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that seductive necromancy, reading.
In the world of Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, books are magic. They are witchcraft, a way to look into and preserve images of another world. I think this book works best when viewed as an homage to words and to stories. It’s not exactly fantasy in the way one thinks of fantasy fiction, but it is an attempt to magnify (perhaps exaggerate) the pleasure of reading, the sadness of reaching the end of the novel.
Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?
And what is most immediately noticeable about Samatar’s work, indeed, the aspect of this book you’ll probably hear talked about most, is how gorgeous this author’s writing is. Which…yes. Sure. The prose in A Stranger of Olondria is stuffed full of imagery, metaphor, and description. But I think that had this book been written by an author with even a smidge less talent, it would have been viewed by critics as entirely self-indulgent, rather than “gloriously vivid and rich” (Adam Roberts, The Guardian). This book sat right on the borderlands, never crossing completely over into gratuitous purpose prose territory—but it came so damn close most of the time, it was almost hard to tell the difference. Imagine reading a great, pages-long description of a cityscape, and thinking “Wow, this is super pretty and really readable” but then, in the same through, wondering “…but is this really necessary for advancing the plot?” Most times the answer was an ambiguous maybe.
For one thing, it took a long time for me to find the plot in the first place. Almost the entirety of the first third of A Stranger in Olondria is made up of the main character, Jevick’s, orgasmic rhapsodies on Olondria’s beautiful culture, architecture, literature, etcetera. Kind of like Samatar created this really intricate world, and then wrote a character whose whole purpose was to expound upon how great that world was, and then gave that character a book to jot down his enthusiastically pro-Olondrian compositions. (Note: I’m being a bit snarky here.)
But there is a plot. Basically, Jevick finally gets his chance to visit Olondria but then promptly ends up haunted by a ghost, and since there’s some kind of tension going on amongst the empire’s religious leaders (for Jevick’s pruposes and the purposes of this review, there’s a cult that believes in hard science and a cult that believes in the supernatural, i.e. ghosts), he winds up as a puppet of Olondrian’s rival religious factions. Meanwhile, all Jevick wants to do is get rid of his ghost, except it takes an inordinate amount of time for it to happen.
Again, I do agree with the majority opinion that Sofia Samatar is an excellent writer, with a true talent for imagery, and a finesse and depth to her world-building. However, I do think that this book got bogged down towards the middle and end sections. Too many stories-within-stories, too many philosophical flights of introspection, etc. I love love love the world of Olondria, but the heady way this author presents it makes it entirely possible to have too much of a good thing.
The world and atmosphere of Olondria itself was wonderful, though. The many descriptions did their job in evoking a sense of the empire’s culture and cities, as well as its love of writing and literature. I’ll probably be picking up The Winged Histories at some point, which details what happens after the events of this book (i.e. some kind of religiously-instigated civil war). I often complain that the bulk of modern fantasy novels I read feel sadly lacking in their constructed cultures and worlds, but that is not a complaint I had here. Again, I felt like Samatar’s writing went almost too far with the descriptions, but I never felt that way because I wasn’t absolutely fascinated by what was being described.
Thoughtful, well-planned fantasy worlds are always something I’m interested in, and A Stranger in Olondria was an excellent, mostly readable, introduction to Sofia Samatar’s imagination. I really enjoyed this.
