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I bought this book in London last year and finally got around to reading it. I had been looking forward to it as Locus listed it as one of 20 most interesting books last year. I do love interesting visions of the future but this one kind of left me feeling sick. You get to know the city through the eyes of the twins Nicolas and Nicola in the first two parts and their description of a world falling to pieces draws you in.
The storyline takes second place to the city itself and I did not mind as the author is a first class worldbuilder and you just want to know more about the world around the city and why it is like this.
The third and final part of the story takes you to Veniss underground the city below the city, it is a hellish tale that has a distinctive mythological flavor, it almost reads like a fable. It´s also very disturbing on so many levels, a big part of the story is genetic enginering and dna manipulation and once you get to Veniss underground it gets really discusting, including cathedrals of human flesh and mountains of severed legs.
I like a good dark gothic tale once in a while but this one kind of went over the top.
http://www.veniss-underground.com/
So I liked it but it left me feeling sick and not wanting to read anything else by this author. Does that make sense?
I´m reading something pretty next.
5 comments:
i kinda feel the same way about "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. I liked the book but parts of it i think have scarred me forever. It is about a girl who was murdered (raped and cut into pieces) by her neighbour (who goes on to do the same thing to other young girls) and is written from the perspective of the girl in a spirit world. I liked so many aspects of the story; the relationships between all the characters, the story line, but it was like a movie that you just have to close your eyes at certain points. i just skipped a few pages when it got gruesome.
this sort of thing sucks because the book is really good so you don't want to stop reading it, but then it alse leaves you feeling gross sometimes so you have to decide between feeling gross or being forever curious about the ending. i usually choose gross, which probably isn't a good thing.
it´s usually easy to skim over the gross parts and read the ending but it was just everywhere in this book, part of every sentence and I really wanted to read it to the end.
are you scarred for life?
no I don´t think I´m scarred for life, but it will live with me for some time
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