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tsuchinoko's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Normally I save my 4+ stars for books with characters I fall in love with, or those with particularly good plots and worlds; The Divinity Student falls short on those fronts for me, but I'm still going to round it up to 4 here.
Despite how trippy this book was at times I still understood what was happening, which is a wondrous thing! I lack the ability to put what the book offers into words, so I highly recommend reading it yourself—even if you just check out the Amazon sample.
The city felt alive through the prose and the characters—the little we were shown into their lives—were interesting. Sure, they may not have had the depth the characters in other books have, but I still found their interactions with the Divinity Student pleasing to read.
Really, the best way to review the book is just saying you should check it out and experience it yourself. I found myself re-reading several paragraphs, soaking the language in even more. While the book was short, it felt long. Long in a nice way. I'm glad I read it.
Despite how trippy this book was at times I still understood what was happening, which is a wondrous thing! I lack the ability to put what the book offers into words, so I highly recommend reading it yourself—even if you just check out the Amazon sample.
The city felt alive through the prose and the characters—the little we were shown into their lives—were interesting. Sure, they may not have had the depth the characters in other books have, but I still found their interactions with the Divinity Student pleasing to read.
Really, the best way to review the book is just saying you should check it out and experience it yourself. I found myself re-reading several paragraphs, soaking the language in even more. While the book was short, it felt long. Long in a nice way. I'm glad I read it.
beefmaster's review
4.0
I've owned a copy of Cisco's Animal Money for a long time, but haven't got around to it or anything else by him thanks to his reputation as "difficult" or "impenetrable." The Divinity Student is his first novel, or perhaps more accurately, novella, and I'm intensely grateful that my local library, often not a bastion of Weird fiction, has three of his books in regular circulation! How divine! The Divinity Student might be described as surrealist fantasy, but I'm not convinced by this categorization. Yes, it's fantasy, if only in that the novel operates within the Fantastic (as per Todorov). I didn't find it that surreal and I suspect the word "surreal" has been exhausted of its specificity by overuse and liberal application. A more apt comparison might be to China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, fantasists working outside of the Tolkien hegemony. The eponymous divinity student has his blood replaced with words, scribbles on scraps of paper, and leaves the seminary for San Veneficio, a Spanish (?) town. He works for a word-finder, getting paid to produce ever more abstruse and obscure words. He finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy (though that word might be too dramatic for what this is) involving formaldehyde, divination by corpse, and a catalogue of forbidden words.
I found myself mostly unengaged by this work, I'm afraid to report. Partly due to its alienness and partly thanks to Cisco's elaborate writing. While his prose is often gorgeous, lush, evocative, it has a distancing effect. I never quite understood what was going as each sentence belabors, quite beautifully, whatever point or description it's going for. Similar to how in Moore's Jerusalem, when a character extinguishing a cigarette could take an entire paragraph, just having the divinity student do something quotidian turned into a baroque cathedral of words. An example, then. The divinity student has entered a laboratory wherein he will learn the secret of the formaldehyde:
Gorgeous writing, the kind I'm always drawn to, with multiple clauses, multiple adjectives, a multiplicity of words. Many of Cisco's choices for descriptors work so beautifully. I'd rather an excess of adjectives than a dearth; they are, after all, the spice of writing. I just wish I had been more invested in the narrative. Luckily, this is only 150 pages, a dense 150, but only 150. I look forward to reading more from Cisco.
I found myself mostly unengaged by this work, I'm afraid to report. Partly due to its alienness and partly thanks to Cisco's elaborate writing. While his prose is often gorgeous, lush, evocative, it has a distancing effect. I never quite understood what was going as each sentence belabors, quite beautifully, whatever point or description it's going for. Similar to how in Moore's Jerusalem, when a character extinguishing a cigarette could take an entire paragraph, just having the divinity student do something quotidian turned into a baroque cathedral of words. An example, then. The divinity student has entered a laboratory wherein he will learn the secret of the formaldehyde:
Magellan's familiar waves the Divinity Student to an empty chair and scuttles off to the wings—where racks of jars stand in static dust: later the familiar will tell his wife, "Today I saw a bottle containing a witch. A witches' ladder, a rope with cockfeathers woven in between the strands, throws curses. An impaled slug on a thorn, in a jaw, withered, colorless, still, in formaldehyde. Shelves of stuffed animals, motheaten, ragged, semicollapsed, dirty, glazed milky eyes. Flat glass slabs for the invertebrates—fish, eels, worms, phosphorescent. On every surface, tiny, neatly penned labels in precambrian ink, dark jumbles.
Gorgeous writing, the kind I'm always drawn to, with multiple clauses, multiple adjectives, a multiplicity of words. Many of Cisco's choices for descriptors work so beautifully. I'd rather an excess of adjectives than a dearth; they are, after all, the spice of writing. I just wish I had been more invested in the narrative. Luckily, this is only 150 pages, a dense 150, but only 150. I look forward to reading more from Cisco.
mamimitanaka's review against another edition
4.0
Exactly the type of weird fantasy energy I've been craving lately, it has a similar sense of seemingly endlessly flourishing idiosyncratic worldbuilding and imagination as a Mieville or a Barker but in structure and development is much more properly strange in terms of the uncanny sensations it conjures, making it land somewhere between kitchen sink dark fantasy and off-kilter bizarro fiction in the realm of a Ligotti or a Schulz. Kinda unfurls like a psychedelic weird-horror magical realism, imagery and sensations coalescing over each other like a kaleidoscope of drugged out genre fiction mechanisms entwining within one another effortlessly. Smoothly crafted with beautiful prose that unfolds like a river of language while avoiding direct indulgence in tropes while skirting juuuuuust close enough to their edges that it satisfies both my literary and fantasy loving sides alike, this definitely felt like a novel tailor made for my tastes.
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."
sunnybopeep's review
4.5
Oh man, this was my first ever Cisco, and it felt like a good place to begin. After all, it was his first published novel.
This book is very short—novella length, but I would suggest really taking your time and savoring it. For one, Cisco has tons of detailed imagery and beautiful language. Some might find it heavy-handed, but the book is so short that I have no complaints. The ideas presented in this book are both novel and utterly fascinating. Ann Vandermeer wasn’t kidding about the killer first chapter, either. It has an almost folktale vibe, and it’s probably one of the best first chapters I’ve ever read.
The only thing keeping it from full marks for me was the slight lack of emotional draw. I could have FELT more, especially with the relationship between the divinity student and his girl. The foundations were laid, but the construction was a little haphazard in that respect.
All in all, this book really embodies the “new weird” in a way similar to OG Vandermeer or Mieville. The influence of Borges is also very apparent. I’m so interested to read more of Cisco’s stuff!
This book is very short—novella length, but I would suggest really taking your time and savoring it. For one, Cisco has tons of detailed imagery and beautiful language. Some might find it heavy-handed, but the book is so short that I have no complaints. The ideas presented in this book are both novel and utterly fascinating. Ann Vandermeer wasn’t kidding about the killer first chapter, either. It has an almost folktale vibe, and it’s probably one of the best first chapters I’ve ever read.
The only thing keeping it from full marks for me was the slight lack of emotional draw. I could have FELT more, especially with the relationship between the divinity student and his girl. The foundations were laid, but the construction was a little haphazard in that respect.
All in all, this book really embodies the “new weird” in a way similar to OG Vandermeer or Mieville. The influence of Borges is also very apparent. I’m so interested to read more of Cisco’s stuff!
Content Warnings
Corpse chop chop formaldehyde fumes
saintdoormatius's review against another edition
4.0
A really compelling read that defies description (or narrative logic). It is ostensibly about a Divinity Student (unnamed - everyone simply calls him by his title) who, after being struck by lightning is brought back from the dead after being stuffed with religious texts. The protagonist is then sent to the city and undertakes a secret mission involving lost words and dead bodies.
It's really best to just not think about it, and revel in Cisco's lush writing. His style, at times, is ponderous and gets bogged down in detail, but when it hits the mark, it is electric. Passages and descriptions will linger, and you'll want to savor and move them around your mouth like a good wine.
It's really best to just not think about it, and revel in Cisco's lush writing. His style, at times, is ponderous and gets bogged down in detail, but when it hits the mark, it is electric. Passages and descriptions will linger, and you'll want to savor and move them around your mouth like a good wine.
dllman05's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
glasstatterdemalion's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
naokamiya's review
4.0
Exactly the type of weird fantasy energy I've been craving lately, it has a similar sense of seemingly endlessly flourishing idiosyncratic worldbuilding and imagination as a Mieville or a Barker but in structure and development is much more properly strange in terms of the uncanny sensations it conjures, making it land somewhere between kitchen sink dark fantasy and off-kilter bizarro fiction in the realm of a Ligotti or a Schulz. Kinda unfurls like a psychedelic weird-horror magical realism, imagery and sensations coalescing over each other like a kaleidoscope of drugged out genre fiction mechanisms entwining within one another effortlessly. Smoothly crafted with beautiful prose that unfolds like a river of language while avoiding direct indulgence in tropes while skirting juuuuuust close enough to their edges that it satisfies both my literary and fantasy loving sides alike, this definitely felt like a novel tailor made for my tastes.
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."
The narrative concerns the titular Divinity Student, an otherwise unnamed scholar who is revived from death after a lightning strike by a shadowy organization of scholars and sent on an odyssey to a mystical desert city called San Veneficio, where he's to reconstruct a mythical catalog of unknown words whose "definitions" are entire small stories in themselves. Along the way, he's haggled by the bizarre sights and customs of the city around him as well as various idiosyncratic inhabitants on a quest to find the secret things hidden within language itself, in a narrative that becomes increasingly surreal and entropic the further The Divinity Student goes to fulfill his mission. This seems very much concerned with the idea that language indeed has tangible effects on reality beyond the abstract nature of its own existence as something we interpret; the deeper the Divinity Student's quest takes him into his linguistic obsessions the more his own reality crumbles and splinters until it's something unrecognizable and the lucid susurrations of the prose match the metamorphosis of the narrative in real-time that creates this really naturalistic sense of psychedelia and sort of being subsumed into a transcendental state of being. The setting adds further tautness to this atmosphere; the city of San Veneficio is weird and off-kilter in its presentation enough that it immediately suggests pure fantasy, but there's references to real world ethnicities and places and concepts while also being suffused with the unreal, making it feel like some kind of far future or undocumented civilization at the margins of the industrialized world.
"Psychedelic" is not only an applicable term for the surface level events itself though, I realized about halfway through that in many ways this feels like a drug narrative via an unorthodox framing in a lot of ways. In order to understand the language he is seeking to study, our protagonist becomes obsessed with the transference of his consciousness into other bodies who knew more of it than he, gaining access to others' subjective thoughts and experiences by dipping their brains in formaldehyde [yeah]. The Divinity Student indulges in this quest for truth via what are essentially mind-altering substances and the more he does it, the more his tolerance builds, always seeking more until the point where he sweeps the only two people he could have called friends in the city into being involved in robbing the graves of former scholars to ingest their Brain Juices™, and rather than humbling himself before the enlightening power of this process he instead indulges it at reckless abandon. It kinda feels like it's poking fun at the whole "enlightened psychonaut" type who bites off more than they can chew when using powerful chemical agents, and while the tone of the book is overall consistently stoical and serious in that decidedly Gothic fashion, this interpretation definitely helped me see a bit of the wild understated humor on display here, especially during the more out-there sequences.
I had a lot of fun with this one; it's wildly creative and beautifully written, and its nature as a debut makes the prospect of more Cisco even more promising for me. I enjoyed it more than his collection "Secret Hours" which was my first foray into his works and while it was good it did not cohere as well as this one, but I have reason to believe his writing only got continuously tighter from here. Perhaps what I enjoyed most was its implications that the fantastic, awesome and mythic lies in language itself; that we can tap into a vast reality beyond ourselves from words, even when words themselves are our own inventions, and that this vast and awesome yet terrifying ability lays quite literally beyond our very own fingertips. I own "Animal Money" but think I'm going to bridge the gap with something a bit shorter before I take it on, most likely "The Narrator".
"Ghosts boil in the air, rustling and crying, libations fall to them on the ground, witch lights glimmer for them, alighting on branches turning trees into candelabras.
Again, he repeats the phrase.
The drumming fattens and shakes the earth, timbre deepening, growing empty and vibrant at the core, each tone dwindles to a buzzing at the corner of hearing just before the next is struck, and faster.
Again, he repeats the phrase."
tregina's review against another edition
3.0
So on the one hand, I love the vividly strange imagery, the glorious idea of being a word-finder, and the dreamlike transitions from state to state. On the other, I felt like it almost leaned too far in the direction of surrealism when I was yearning for more meaty detail about his existence and vocation. I love the weird, but it turns out I love the weird most within a stronger narrative line. Still, not something I'm going to soon forget.