We're Back

Well, Bali is a very nice place. The sort of place to make you think (to quote Belle's brother) 'sometimes I don't care what people write on the internet.' There is wisdom in that sort of lofty other-worldliness, if you can sustain it.

The most exciting moment came when the freak high wave hit and my excellent two-in-one edition of Paul Park's Soldiers of Paradise and Sugar Rain got whirled and spun and filled with sand, which took some time drying and brushing out later. The deck chairs floated. Belle grabbed Zoë, so she wasn't washed out to sea or anything. (But she was surprised to wake up under such turbid circumstances.) My flip flops were washed up about ten feet and my glasses on the little side table ... well, I like my new frames better. Getting new glasses in downtown Bali is a very reasonable economic proposition.

Henry Farrell gifted us the Park, which is tremendous. I'm stunned by the glory. I'll write a review later. It's out of print, but I gather his new book, A Princess of Roumainia, is getting good attention. The edition we have, thanks to Henry, is one of those cheap Fantasy & SF book club hardback editions. The cover art is dreadful; invasive sand and surf hardly wreaked especial improvement in print quality. But I realize I'm nostalgic about these editions, since I used to borrow stacks of a friend's dad's club hardbacks back in the late 70's.

See here for a very interesting interview with Park, plus sample cover art. Would you voluntarily read a book covered with this? Well, you should. Buy them used from Amazon for a penny. But buy them.

Comments

[des von bladet]

Gift is verbed now? Has anyone sloganed "The gift that keeps on gifting" yet?

[Kip Manley]

Paul Park is tremendous, those Starbridge books are essential additions to any decent SF library (make sure to pick up The Cult of Loving Kindness), and I'm halfway through Princess and already I want to grab the lapels of random passersby and thrust it under their noses and cry, "See? This is how it's done, by God!"

[Timothy Burke]

Park is so fucking good. Though the Cult of Loving Kindness, contra Kip, I think starts to strip away the druggy, amazing-shit brilliance of the first two and become, well, just another goddamn allegory. Good, but not divine.

Very similar vein: K.J. Bishop's Etched City. I promise to send you a copy if you will resupply address so I can send you my forgotten eBay booty.

Princess is on my kitchen table now, beckoning to me. This weekend, perhaps, not in Bali, just plain old Pennsylvania.

[Carlos]

I'm fond of the Avon cover of Sugar Rain, even though I don't think the artist was very familiar with mehndi. (Shoot, these books are over fifteen years old. What American artist was, back in 1989?)

Anyway, I still remember that the hardcover of Soldiers of Paradise had Lucius Shepard comparing it to Yashar Kemal's Memed, My Hawk. That was a fruitful linkage.

I was not blown away by A Princess of Roumania, although I recognize its quality. Sometimes, in Park's fiction, while his sources are transmogrified, the transitions between them aren't. I am pretty sure Park knows this -- hell, I once heard him comment about this tendency in his fiction at Dixon Place -- and he often makes a virtue of these discontinuities. Other times, it doesn't work as well.

The plot of Princess is pre-adapted to discontinuities (I'm not giving anything away here) but there are places where the joins between background story elements don't seem smoothed over enough. I'm thinking of the Philip Pullman bits especially.

The evocations of his alternate Roumania, though, are very good.

[Gary Farber]

Murpfle. Working a few floors downstairs from David at Arbor House buying Paul Park while I was at Avon. Happyhappy.