The Viral City: Palimpsest

Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente, Bantam Books, 2009

This isn’t a review of Palimpsest.  Many better writers than I have already done that. For example, here, here and here.  I do have some thoughts about the book, though.

The premise of the book is a viral city, transmitted through sexual contact.  Palimpsest is the city, a place people visit in dreams after they’ve had sex with someone who has visited Palimpsest previously.  How would you know?  Because anyone who has visited the city returns to our world (the waking world?  the real world?) with part of a map on their bodies, a cross between a tattoo and a birthmark.  While you are in the city, you can only visit the sector that was mapped on your partner’s body.

This premise shouldn’t work at all, but it does.

“Tourists,” (dreamers?  us?) visiting Palimpsest for the first time are bundled into groups of four, and are bound together in a dream fashion, even though each one visits a separate sector of the city.  The book follows each member of one of these “quartos,” both in the dream-city and through their struggles to make sense of things back in this world.

Comments on Amazon have called the book choppy and slow.  It is both those things.  It has also been called poetic and startlingly original, and it is both of those things as well.  The book is choppy because Valente chooses to follow each of the four tourists in both worlds.  At first they, and we, see only scraps of the dream-city.  As they begin to work out the code, and seek new partners with new maps, the city begins to coalesce and a new voice emerges, a new storyteller, face hidden in the shadows, begins to tell us the stories—about the city and about its civil war.

The book might be about dreams, or language, but Valente loves books, and the building blocks of books.  The four visitors are not called a quartet or a quatrain—they are a “quarto.”  One of the four is a Roman book-binder whose patron saint is Isadore, credited with the compilation of the first encyclopedia.  When the four are initiated into Palimpsest, their feet are dipped in ink.  Sei, the tourist from Tokyo who loves trains, is brought into the city by a man who has self-published a book about trains, a book Ludovico, the book-binder, assembled.  A class of beings in Palimsest call themselves the Pecia.

At first the connections between the four, spread across the globe, seem random until it is revealed that the city selects its tourists.  The civil war was a war over immigration, and the side that won invites people into the city’s embrace.  If all four members of a quarto can meet in this world, they can take up residence permanently in Palimpsest.

The intimation is that Palimpsest created itself from the text of an earlier city (its name is Palimpsest after all) and that other dream cities may be developing from the matrix of dreams that is this one.

The book is slow in spots, and the intentionally fevered, poetical pitch of the prose can be exhausting.  Using one of her own books as a guiding meme for one character seems both precious and pretentious.  But so what?  She makes this crazy idea work.  She leaves us with questions within questions, a series of nested, carved ivory balls.  Who was the first human to ever get to Palimpsest?  How did she (he? they?) get there?  What are the other cities that are alluded to? What made Casimira so different from the ones who came before her?  None of these unanswered questions is a loose end or a failure.  Each is mystery, living in the larger mystery of the viral city.