City of Saints and Madmen / Viriconium

I just finished Viriconium and couldn't help but reflect on its similarities and differences to City of Saints and Madmen. Viriconium precedes and obviously serves as an inspiration for CSM. To bullet point the characteristics they share, both:

1. Are genre works which defy conventional genre expectations.
   
2. Consist of a combination of novellas and short stories with intriguing and sometimes conflicting connections among them.
   
3. Center around the existence of mythical cities.
   
4. Are postmodern in the extent that they acknowledge their own textuality.

Interestingly, they seem to go in very different directions. CSM creates the illusion of a real city, and the various stories/texts and their moments of agreement or conflict suggest the real life of a real place with all its corresponding messiness. Viriconium, on the other hand, seems to sort of deconstruct itself, and as the stories go on, it almost doesn't seem as if they're writing about the same place, almost as of stories from different cultures, writing about a long disappeared mythical place.

It was interesting to see such similar approaches yield such different results.

I will have to put these on my reading list. I don't usually read the Fantasy genre, but I like genre fiction that transcends genre limitations, and the structure of these books sounds quite interesting.

How do they compare thematically?

There's a certain overlap in that both cities have artists' communities, and those artists sometimes serves as important characters. Viriconium has some of the genre tropes of warriors going out to defeat an enemy, though it is a feature that gets dealt with in some increasingly interesting ways as the stories progress. What I liked best about Viriconium was Harrison's style, which evolves over the novels, the baroqueness Peake-ing with the second novella. (I'm sorry; I could not resist that pun.)

CSM has a pretty strong theme about the intersection of life and communication. It's very concerned with the way that the twin forms of academic and artistic expression serve to reveal, obscure, and deal with experience--and the extent to which any form of communication has a privellge in creating truth. I hope that doesn't make it sound too pomo/intellectual, because it is a very entertaining book.

Your description of CSM's theme makes me want to read it.

I read both books in the last couple years. I really loved the first novella in Viriconium but the other got increasingly more and more surreal. Definitely a couple brilliant moments but most of the time I felt I was wasting my time, forcing myself to finish.

CSM was more consistently readable and I loved many of the ideas and the sheer quirkiness of it all. No cliches here. As a result I went on to read Veniss Underground and enjoyed that quite a bit also.

ragwaine - I'd also recommend Shriek. It's a sequel to CSM, not quite as varied as the former, it's still quite good. Viriconium was definitely challenging, but I do enjoy surrealism enough that I wasn't too frustrated with it.

Thanks, at the moment I don't have anything else from Vandermeer but ALL of his books are on my wishlist. He's been talked about quite a bit (if I recall correctly) in the Weird Fiction group (hear on libraryThing).