![]() ![]() He sets up a tryst with his lover, or at least innocently believes he does. In the course of trying to win this strange love, he travels through some odd parts of the city, and visits the priest Cadimon Signal, his former teacher. He falls in love with a woman he glimpses in an upstairs window of the offices of Hoegbottom, a company that seems to have tentacle-like arms running through the social fabric of Ambergris and despite being told by a dwarf, named Dvorak, that he has fallen in love with just an image, he persists in his passion. "Dradin, In Love," follows a young, supposedly out-of-work missionary as he tries to establish a place for himself in the city of Ambergris. Of them, in my reading of the book, three works emerged as central: "Dradin, In Love," "The Transformation of Martin Lake," and "The Strange Case of X." These three are the most interesting and compelling narratives-and also the parts where VanderMeer's playful ambition appears at its most balanced. ![]() The book contains over a dozen sections of greatly varying length. Not a novel, but rather a thematic collection, it contains works of short fiction-and also what we might call fictional associated matter-linked by their all having something to do with an imaginary place named Ambergris, an exotic city full of odd dwellings and odder dwellers. Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen is a playfully ambitious book. ![]()
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