5/30/2023 0 Comments Ambergris jeff vandermeerIn these varied pieces we learn about the foundation of the city by Cappan John Manzikert, the ‘whaler-cum-pirate’ hear of the original gray cap inhabitants, the mysterious fungal race who are driven below ground, their city of Cinsorium razed to the ground and of their establishment of a labyrinthine city beneath the city, from which they make ghostly forays aboveground. We were first introduced to this fantastic locale in City of Saints and Madmen, a collection whose stories were presented in the form of histories with extensive and eccentrically discursive footnotes, opinionated biographies, cultural and biological monographs, tales published in Ambergisian magazines (the Burning Leaves journal in this case), souvenir booklets (‘in celebration of the 300th Festival of the Freshwater Squid), art reviews, medical reports and a final glossary and appendix on imaginary fonts. Rather than a jewelled city, Ambergris is a fungal and foetid one, its hidden subterraenean race of mycological beings increasingly permeating its inhabitants and architecture with spores which bloom into new exotic and weird forms. I’ve just finished reading Finch, seemingly the last of Jeff Vandermeer’s stories set in the ornate, decadent and grotesquely fecund city of Ambergris – for the time being, anyway.
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