A Stranger in Olondria

Olondria

by Sofia Samatar

In this hypnotic debut Jevik the pepper merchant's son dreams of far Olondria. Raised by his tutors on the written dreams of the distant city, when he gets the opportunity to travel there, his life is thrown off track when he is haunted by the ghost of a girl whom he must face down before he can go free. Reading has never been so seductive, so dangerous. Sofia Samatar is an American of Somali and Swiss German Mennonite background. Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld , Stone Telling , Apex , and Strange Horizons . She wrote A Stranger in Olondria in Yambio, South Sudan, where she worked as an English teacher. She has worked in Egypt and now lives in the USA with her family.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Books About Books, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Ghosts

300 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 2013

About the author

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar.

Reviews

[chai (thelibrairie on tiktok) ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tore me end to end with the kind of awed heartache I've only ever felt before in the presence of poetry and I don't know what to do with how much I feel, or where to put it in my heart.

[Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drenched in equal parts beauty and sorrow, Sofia Samatar's lush first novel makes for compelling reading. I had first journyed to the island of Tinimavet, homeland of Jevick, a pepper merchant's son and subsequent heir, via a chapbook preview given out at WisCon 2012. After reading the first several chapters, I was addicted to Samatar's rich prose, as well as being enamored of the Tea Islands and the titular Olondria, to which Jevick travels after his father dies and he takes over the family trade.

The beauty of the milieu is that, rather than yet another medieval Euro-clone fantasy world, the world of Olondria and the Tea Islands is derived from South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Malaysian or Indonesian frames. Having tangentially studied some of these areas (my Master's Degree is in African History), I was impressed not only by the trappings, but by the cultural honesty and authenticity that informed the characters' actions and attitudes. This is no simplistic rendering of quaint folk-tales, either, though there is a fairy-tale quality to some of the sub-stories that are told within the greater narrative. It is a rich and varied web, a real relief from Eurocentric works and the tired glut of urban fantasy. Sick of Tolkien clones? Give this a try. Love Tolkien clones? Try this.

I must admit that the opiate prose of the chapbook set me up for an emotional fall where the chapbook left off and the rest of the book picked up. I had no idea that I was standing on the edge of an abyss. You see, I waited a full year for the full book to be published and had been lulled into a sense of warmth and security by the beauty of the settings and of Samatar's writing. That warmth and security was soon shattered as I read about Jevick finding himself thrust into a series of mishaps, through no fault of his own, which affect him and those around him, shattering the envelope of innocence and optimism that might have surrounded him in his childhood. Worst of all, he is haunted, literally, by the soul of a young girl, Jissavet, whom he met on his way to Olondria and who subsequently died from the disease kyitna. Her ghost invades his life, ordering him to immortalize her by writing a Vallon, or book. When he reveals to others that Jissavet's ghost has come to visit him, some are convinced that he is insane and in need of confinement and healing, others see him as a saint, an Avneanyi, blessed with the gift to speak with angels. Through all the intervening intrigue, he searches for her body so that he can burn her remains and give her a proper send-off into the afterlife, releasing her from entrapment between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Ultimately, A Stranger in Olondria is about the power of books, both redemptive and destructive. By being taught to read and write in his youth by an Olondrian tutor, Jevick is eventually thrust into his harrowing journey by the books he reads. He is tormented into writing a book and, when he does so, finds himself falling in love with the girl who dictates her life's story to him, a love that can never be requited, because the object of his love is dead and he is required to release her from her ghostly existence between the worlds of the living and the dead.

This is a deeply moving book, intellectually stimulating and emotionally poignant. The story, the characters, the overwhelming sense of sweetness, sadness, and nostalgia will stick with me for some time. It is a multi-layered work, with stories within stories like Russian dolls, and this structure works, for the most part. Even the one structural hiccup, the mechanical transition from Jevick's story to Jissavet's, is smoothed out by the overall excellence of the writing, the beauty of the setting and cultures, and the heart-breaking feeling of yearning that tears at the reader's soul. This is clearly the best book I've read thus far this year.

It was worth the wait.

Don't wait. Read it!

Addendum: I am very, very happy to see that this book won the 2014 World Fantasy Award for best novel. Well-deserved! And for those who haven't read it yet . . . I already told you to read it!!!

[Allison Hurd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this is another case where the author's intentions and their book's path to creation did not match. The story is the last 100 pages. The rest is backstory that actively turned me off from caring about the story or the world.

CONTENT WARNING: (no actual spoilers, just a list of topics) rape, mutilation, loss of a child, child abuse, prolonged illness, war, borderline pedophilia, racism, classism

Things that held potential

-The world. Vivid, fleshed out and exciting. The different religions, the way language shaped thought, all of that was very impressive.

-The Jissi story arc. This is the meat of the story and it was the only part that held my interest. I wish this had been more integrated throughout the book.

-Adoration of books and language. Most of this reads as a love poem to literature, and I think most bibliophiles can empathize. It went a bit toooo far for me, but I'll discuss that below.

Things that annoyed me to no end

-The writing. When I was in elementary school, a boy joined my tae kwon do class and everyone oo'd and aww'd over him because he'd gone to competitions before. He performed flying spinning kicks and could land with his leg basically in splits next to his head. But then he'd try to spar like that, too, and got his ass kicked, because he knew how to make functional things into art, but not art into function. I had flashbacks to that throughout the first two-thirds of this book. I think the author wanted to write poetry or travelogues (or both) but was informed that neither paid, so she clothed her own poetry and travelogues in fantasy and resold it that way. It was very pretty, but it didn't convey anything to me about the book I was reading. It felt arbitrary and messy, despite the careful construction of sentences and the $10 words.

-The plot and internal consistency. The plot requires the protagonist to do things that make no sense given the exhaustive information we have regarding their character. (actual spoilers) Why the hell wouldn't he jump at the chance to write a book about the woman he "loves?" How did he survive to carry Miros when he said that nightly he was so weak that he couldn't even roll over to vomit? I also thought the comparisons of books to human lives got a bit too precious, too idealistic for the setting we were in.

-The majority of the other characters. There was no one to sink your teeth into, aside from those in Jissi's arc. The people on screen most of the time were vapid, obtuse, and had the emotional range of a turnip--and I include in this the MC, just swap vapid for pretentious.

-Development. This book starts off with the air of a quest or coming of age narrative, quickly loses steam on that front, switches to an adventure story, forsakes that, becomes a ghost story, gives that up, changes to a story of mental illness, goes back to a quest story, gets bored with that, becomes a story of intrigue and insurrection, and finally says it's a ghost-love-coming of age-quest story that satisfies none of those itches. I would have loved if the ghost story element had been interwoven more, so that as we learned the world we also got more about the ghost and how difficult things are/were for her.

In summary, I was very disappointed in this. It chooses form over function and obfuscates the story until it's so irritating to spend any more time with all of the time skips and "profound poetry" that the author added for us that the story loses its emotional peaks. I would have preferred a much tighter, more supernatural story that mirrored the conflicts the protagonist faces elsewhere, and gave up some of the frills for some substance.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets in Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call "the breath of angels" and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirell fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom.

Tourism to far-away exotic places can be expensive in this world, and a disappointment once you get there and find the place overrun by thousand of other tourists like you. It is easier and cheaper to go visit virtual destinations, conjured by the magic of the writen word, to learn about their history, myths, cuisine, folk dances, climate and arhitecture, art and philosophy under the supervision of a professional tour guide. Sofia Samatar knows of such a magical destination, and has gracefully accepted to share its wonders with us. We are all strangers to Olondria, and it only took the opening paragraph I quoted above to convince me that I want to go there and see for myself its sigths and its people, to feel the scented breezes blowing from the shore, to taste the spicy foods and to listen to the songs and to the tales around the campfires.

My interest in this travelogue type of fantasy has its roots in the sailing stories of Joseph Conrad and in the accounts of explorers from Marco Polo to Thor Heyerdahl. When the white spots on the map of our Earth were exhausted, I turned my attention to fantasy and science-fiction, trying to recapture the sense of adventure and wonder. Sofia Samatar joins with her debut novel a select club of imaginative writers who, while not being adverse to the political and martial aspects of epic fantasy, are masters of worldbuilding: Jack Vance, Patricia McKillip, Sean Russel and recently Robert V S Reddick. She shares with them also a lyrical prose, an intimate tone and an enchantment with the diversity and richness of life, with the accumulation and sublimation of myths and histories into poetry. For this, and for the inspiration of her novel in the African / Oriental cultural heritage instead of the usual Western / Arthurian fare of fantasy, I would also align Sofia Samatar with the works of Guy Gavriel Kay.

... a river is there, which is paved with stars. Its surface is covered with almond blossom; it runs through the fields of my dream like a river of snow. The White River, it is called. It is upon the redness of poppy fields, upon the blueness of fields of lavender. Its water is sweet, and the nymphs who dwell in it are friends of men. All day they sit on its banks, carding wool ...

As with Kay's romances, the magic of Olondria is subtle, understated, a trick of the light or a hazy afterimage left in the wake of a dream. In this way, it makes the journey more believable, easier to translate into the reader's everyday experiences. This is one of the reason's the journey is told through the eyes of a 'stranger', of an innocent that can cast a fresh eye upon a land suffused with time and history:

My name is Jevick. I come from the blue and hazy village of Tyom, on the western side of Tinimavet in the Tea Islands.

Jevick is a young boy, growing in afluence on a spice plantation, but isolated from the rest of the world by the distances to the mainland of Olondria and by the barriers of language and illiteracy. His first contact with the distant shores comes when his father brings back from one of his business trips a tutor for Jevick. This Olondrian tutor has as his only baggage a trunk full of books. First with the letters, then with the words, then with the whole incredible wealth of a thousand stories and poems, the mind of young Jevick is sent out to ever widening horizons. He becomes a reader, a dreamer, an explorer, long before he will actually set sail from his island shores to the fabled city of Bain:

I, too, soon after I read my first book, Nardien's Tales for the Tender, succumbed to the magical voices that called to me from their houses of vellum. It was a great wonder to me to come so close to these foreign spirits, to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of those I had never known, to communicate with the dead, to feel that I knew them intimately, and that they knew me more completely than any person I knew in the flesh.

Will the actual journey rise up to the expectations built by the fairytales, romances and epic adventures of the books? Or will Jevick's innocence be crushed by the cruel reality of a predatory world? I had similar fears before my first visits to Paris or Venice, places that I have visited many times through the pages of my books before I have actually walked on the historical cobbles or through the twisted canals, and like Jevick my experience was a blending of both the sublime and the ordinary. His innocence is lost, but throughout his journey in Olondria he is overlaying the virtual space of story over the actual landscape before his eyes.

Sofia Samatar is not content with a simple tourist visit to Olondria and with the facile metaphor of reading and travelling. Jevick's journey becomes a metaphysical one, a rite of passage and a catalyst for change on a world-wide scale when his passion for the written word is confronted with censorship, and when his interest in a young girl is confronted by the presence of death. The two quests of the boy - the one for truth and the one for the persistence of memory are united in the story he is writing about the girl who died of an incurable disease before she had a chance to live her live, before she could get noticed by the world. Jevick must write her history into a 'vallon' (a requiem?) in order to save himself from his internal demons, and to save her from oblivion, to make her life mean a change for the better for the people she left behind

Come angel, I said. I called her Visible, the Ninth wonder, Empress of Sighs. Come, I said, and I will show you magic from the north, your own words conjured into a vallon. A book, angel, a garden of spears. I will hold the pen for you, and I will weave a net to catch your voice. I will do what no one has done, I will write in Kideti, a language like you and me, a ghost hesitating between worlds. Between the rainstorms, angel, and the white light of the north. Between the river dolphins and the wolves. Between the far south, the lands of elephants and amber, and this: the land of cypresses and snow.
So come. Sing to me of Kiem, speak to me of rivers. Pour your memories into my pen.

The journey to Olondria becomes in the 'vallon' a journey to Kiem, another of the distant spice islands, where a young girl is born to a poor family where she rebels against her destiny and struggles to evade into a larger world. She is courageous, she is fickle, she is thirsty for adventure ( It's not only that I'm different, it's that I don't want to be different and yet I am proud, almost proud of the difference itself.). She begs passing sailors to take her and her friends away from their tiny abode on Kiem :

Take us with you. Take us to see the bazaars of Akaneck. Take us to Prav, to the city of Vad-Von-Poi. Take us to live in that city of towers, pulley, wells, and fountains, to be sailors, to wear trousers and blue tunics. Take us to where the women have windblown hair and tapering eyes and smoke cigars, to where they grow hibiscus flowers, the flowers that make the wine you carry in an ancient glass bottle, tied at your waist, underneath your clothes.

She is taken instead by an illness that makes her a pariah in her village and she learns unpleasant truths about her heritage, but in a last effort at a cure she crosses paths with Jevick, and the rest is history in the making :

A book, says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

You need to read the story yourself to see if this last claim makes sense or not. It did for me, and I'm glad I visited Olondria. I urge you to follow through and set sail for its fragrant shores :

Inscrutable country of the north - ravishing Olondria! Suddenly, as we pulled away on the sea, she unveiled the beauty of that coast with a limpid gesture of the light which seemed to contain a coy and voluptuous smile.

---

before I wrap up and post the review, I almost forgot to mention another influence on Samatar - Italo Calvino and his Invisible Cities, places of mystery and wonder, beauty and sadness. Calvino of the metafictional second person narration where the reader is an integral part of the story and the act of reading is key to the understanding of life. As I turn the last pages of the novel I come across a message written directly to me :

Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely the breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been back and forth on this one. At first I was in the 3-star zone (really closer to a 3.5). Later I was certain that there were real moments of 5-star stuff here, especially near the end when things started coming together (or falling apart as the case may be). So in the end I think I’m pretty comfortable with a 4-star rating, even if there were times in the early and middle sections when I found my mind wandering a bit. Even these slow parts of the book had some truly marvellous passages despite being a bit of a slog. To say that Samatar writes lyrically would be an understatement: she certainly knows her way around the English language and manages to write sumptuously without falling into purple prose. Her descriptions are beautiful, though sometimes maybe just a wee bit overlong, hence some of my early problems. In a lot of ways I find it so hard to really pin-point what was ‘wrong’ with the parts I was a little less than thrilled by that I come away feeling, as others have implied, that it was perhaps I who failed the book and not the other way around.

So what’s it about? Well, ultimately it is about two things. It is a story about stories and it is a story about hauntings. It is the tale of a man haunted by the dreams of the books into which he has tried to escape as well as the much more literal haunting by a spirit of the unquiet dead. It is the tale of a girl haunted by the illness and death that left her hungering even for the disappointments of the spectre of her lost life. It is also the tale of two men, each living in exile and haunted by the lost love of a woman he can never have and the regrets of the choices that have made up the story of their lives. It really is a heart-breaking story.

More literally it is primarily the tale of Jevick, the son of a pepper merchant from the small tropical island of Tyom who dreams of one day visiting the great cosmopolitan city of Bain in the empire of Olondria. As this dream becomes fulfilled Jevick’s life is thrown into chaos as he is overwhelmed by political, religious, and mystical forces far outside his experience.

I have rarely seen such an accomplished expression of the sorcery of reading, the grammarie wherein one can commune with the dead, shift shape, travel through time & space and even visit, or create, unknown worlds. Indeed the driving force behind the undead spirit that haunts Jevick is the desire to have her story told in a book so that, in some small way at least, she will never die and can live through her story again and again. For isn’t that what our lives are? Stories? Perhaps not literally given that life is rarely so clean-cut and linear as stories tend to be, but when we look back on the apparently jumbled events in our lives we force them into the patterns and shapes that give them significance, that turn them into stories that define us and give meaning to what could otherwise appear meaningless. In essence this is a story about stories and a book about books and the way our lives both mirror them and are shaped by them. A story about how our lives, and the stories they become, can tear our hearts asunder.

This ‘looking back’ in order to gain meaning from our lives can easily become a two-edged sword of course: it is often only in looking back that we perceive our mistakes, our lost chances, our less than ideal choices. Samatar deftly captures that recognition of those “Lost hours, irretrievable, hours that I would have taken up and treasured and which were scattered abroad in the mud.” Or again the perception that our life has moved on compared with the experience of reading a deeply loved story:

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? – No.

We all have experiences of those golden books, don’t we? That’s probably why we’re here on GR after all. Those books that have given brightness in the darkness, hope in moments of pain, or even just joy when life was already joyous. We enter into the life of books, which in many ways is kin to the spirit, and when they are those golden books of our hearts we become exalted. Of course this also means that the return to the world is nearly always a disappointment, a desolation. Can we ever recapture that magic? We are always trying.

[Althea Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most beautifully written novels I'm encountered in quite some time. Everything here springs to vivid, sensual life... it's a lush sea of language, interspersed with shimmering pearls of phrases. Samatar's background and experience as a poet is clear.

Jevick is a young man whose father's trading business depends on commerce with the country of Olondria - a far more cosmopolitan location than Jevick's small island. In order to prepare him to take over his duties, his father acquires an Olondrian tutor, who infuses the boy's typical small-town angst with a deep wanderlust, raising Olondria to near-mythic status in his mind.

However, after his father passes away and Jevick embarks on his first business trip to Olondria, he discovers that, his schooling aside, he's not fully prepared for everything that Olondria might have in store for him.

On the face of it, the story might sound like a typical village-boy-meets-big-city narrative, but so many things about the book raise it above the average. I loved the investigation into what forms our identity and makes us who we are. The book never falls into the traps of 'the simple life is better' or 'the cosmopolitan life is better' - the pros and cons of both are recognized, and it's shown clearly that which Jevick has yearned to leave his village, there are others, in Olondria, who might yearn for his life and upbringing. I very much appreciated how two cultures (and hints of many more) are drawn as whole, complex (and sometimes strange) things, without any too-easy parallels to 'our world.'

However, while it's a pleasure to inhabit the world of this book, I do have to say that for me, it was lacking a certain tension. It had more of a meandering feel to it. The structure was also oddly designed, and I'm not sure that worked all that well. 3/4 of the book is Jevick's story, and then the book abandons him to tell someone else's story, at quite some length, before going back to Jevick again. Yes, there are narrative reasons for this, (and the second story is also very good) but I felt that it interrupted the flow of the plot in an awkwardly distracting way.

Still, I liked this - especially the writing style - enough that I will definitely seek out Samatar's next novel, which is to be released shortly.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book nearly unbearable to read. It had lifeless characters, a confused and meandering plot and many irrelevant digressions that add nothing to the story. Even worse, the female characters seem to be either bitter, oppressed victims or wan, submissive idiots. The one exception was the bitchy, unlikeable ghost girl with whom the main character falls hopelessly in love. At least she showed some spunk. Still worse was the writing style: florid, bombastic prose poetry that bored and irritated at the same time. Prose poetry seems to act like beer goggles for many readers, evoking a curious admiration even as they give up on finishing the book. For me it was like being stuck in an elevator with someone wearing too much perfume.

[Charlotte Kersten]

"It is dangerous to build. Once you have built something- something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realize that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer."

So What's It About?

Jevick is the son of a wealthy pepper merchant on a small island with a strictly oral tradition, and his father employs a tutor from the far-off land of Olondria to teach him to read and write. Jevick's love of books begins here, and he is captivated by the marvels of Olondria described by his favorite authors. When his father dies, Jevick takes over his duties as a merchant and travels to the land of his dreams. A chance encounter with a dying girl on the boat journey to Olondria turns his voyage into a nightmare, as she begins to haunt him and demand that he write her a vallon, or book. His journey to bring her peace forces him to confront Olondria's deadly undercurrent of political conflict and the true power of the written word.

What I Thought

This is, quite simply, a gorgeous book - lyrical, lush and melancholy. There is a permeating sense of sorrow that transforms even the happiest of moments into a reflection upon loss and the transitory nature of joy. Jevick's restlessness and yearning touch every page, and his love for Olondria and his gradual process of disillusionment are beautiful if tragic things to behold.

A Stranger in Olondria meditates on the incredible allure of a foreign culture, and the outsider's desperate desire to belong. Jevick is marked by his dark skin in Olondria, viewed as an oddity at best and an uncouth savage at worst. In these encounters he is always quick to try to prove that he is not truly an outsider- that he has been educated like an Olondrian, that he is not truly different, that his desperate desire to belong is proof enough that he should belong. His awakening from his idealistic dream of Olondria is a harsh one that shows him that the ugliest of tendencies still exist even in the most magical of lands.

And yet. Even as he flees the worst of political persecutions and realizes that Olondria is a powder keg about to explode, he clearly cannot help himself from loving this land steeped in rich tradition and beauty. Quotes from his favorite Olondrian authors are abundant in his writing and he painstakingly and almost obsessively recounts the landmarks and traditions he encounters, the ballads and tales he hears as he travels. I long for and love Olondria because Jevick does, and because of the book's ability to capture his love and longing:

"I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets in Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call "the breath of angels" and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk, and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom. But of all this I knew nothing."

This book is also deeply concerned with the power of the written word - its power to transform and captivate, to memorialize and immortalize. Even as the libraries of Olondria burn at the end of the book, Jevick has returned to his island of Tinimavet to teach the children of his home to read. Individual writings may and will be destroyed, but as long as the ability to read and write remains, so does hope.

The main thing that I love about this book is the process of Jevick writing a vallon for Jissavet, the girl who torments him after her death. She is a revelation of a character, full of the incomprehensible pain and fury of her young life and death. She demands to be more than her death -to be remembered, to have meant something, to have her story told. Throughout the process of writing the vallon Jevick comes to love Jissavet for her insistence on this right to be remembered, and her trust in his ability to tell her story. The actual vallon is documented in full, and it is a thing of beauty. I think the best I can do is leave you with the ending to Jissavet's story:

"You can sit in the corner. It's all you can do, when it starts raining. Sit in the dry corner and watch the water slide on the floor. It finds its way to the doorway at last and joins the rest of the rain, down there, outside. There's thunder, darkness, a cold fog everywhere.

But sometimes - wasn't it true that you would go outside, when the sky had cleared, and run, screaming and jumping to dash the raindrops from the leaves? Wasn't it true that the smell of the mud was buoyant, delightful, excessive- that the yellow light of the flats outshone the sky? And everywhere you could hear your own voice ringing in the cold air, and you would charge through the reeds which sprang back, scattering moisture. And the sea, still bubbling, angry, glowed with a heavy phosphorescence. You could play with it: its radiance clung to the body."

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a line in this breathtaking novel that had me thinking of the lilting cadences of Out of Africa: "And I was riding a white mule," I said, "bringing pepper to sell on the hill..."

One of the most constraining aspects of SF and fantasy is the definitions that are inevitably used to corral, and often pigeonhole, these genres. Think of SF, and many people think automatically of spaceships and space battles; think of fantasy, and Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings will be evoked.

Then you get a hybrid creature like A Stranger in Olondria that straddles the genre divide effortlessly, and, in its magnificent difference, reminds one how little you actually know of the true potential and power of these genres to subvert and intoxicate.

It is a humbling experience, even an overpowering one; ultimately, it is a rare privilege to read something as exquisite as this.

Samatar's writing reminds me of Samuel R. Delany, Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe. This is not to say she is derivative, but that she has the same power to enthrall and elucidate as these grand masters (and one mistress).

A young man from an outlying village journeys to a city that is the epitome of civilisation, where he becomes haunted by a lost spirit that compels him to write her life story in the form of a book - or 'vallon', as it is called in that world, a 'chamber of words'.

Books are magical, and writing is deeply mysterious. What unfurls is a tender and sad tale of possession and heartbreak, interspersed with some gorgeous travel writing and lilting soliloquies about life and writing, art and experience, faith and superstition, religion and science.

The book is sub-titled 'Being the Complete Memoirs of the Mystic, Jevick of Tyom'. As with any respectable fantasy novel, it has a map of the Empire of Olondria at the beginning. It begins with a languorous description of the wonders of this realm, to which Jevick, as a stranger, is as unfamiliar with as is the reader.

As with Jevick, the reader falls in love with this fabled realm; his journey of discovery essentially mirrors the reader's journey through the novel. (There is nothing polemical or dialectical about Samatar's depiction of such subtle contrasts.)

The story does veer into darkness towards the end, but it is a necessary darkness, a mixture of melancholy and terror that adds rich seasoning to the novel's heady brew.

Samatar's particular approach to the alien culture she depicts is to focus on sensory detail, and a richness of imagery that is gorgeous and enticing. This is simply an incredibly beautiful and beguiling book to read; it is no small feat that Samatar avoids being cloying or sentimental.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edit: This is a reread, and although I still agree with everything I wrote in my review from 2016, I found that the overly long and flowering descriptions of cities and places bothered me a bit this time, at least until the plot really gets going. When every place mentioned is described as fantastically poetic and special and beautiful, nothing really stands out.

There are some spoilers about the main plot in this review, but no more than it says on the back of the book jacket of my edition :)

A Stranger in Olondria is not a typical fantasy book, and that's why I liked it so much. Unlike much fantasy, the world building is not based on medieval Europe, it's more exotic and original. I'm not sure where I would place its influences, but I know the author is part Somali, so maybe that's it. There is no chosen one out to save the world, but there is a long journey, culture clashes, ghosts, and different religious fractions fighting each other.

This is a slow and contemplative book. The language is intricate and beautiful, and demands a little bit more of the reader than most fantasy books I have read, but not enough for anybody to be intimidated. It takes a bit of time to get into, though.

Jevick, the son of a pepper merchant, lives on the Tea Islands, and dreams about Olondria, the mainland to the north. His Olondrian tutor teaches him to read and write, and imbibes in him a great love of books. The people of the Tea Islands are mostly illiterate, and Jevick longs for Olondria, were books and reading are common.

I always find it especially enjoyable to read about characters who love reading. Jevick's descriptions of the books he reads are wonderful, and his interest in books and stories often leads to stories within stories within stories - all of them unraveling the culture, mythology and politics of the Tea Islands and Olondria. Both are full and complex cultures, that the reader gets to learn quite a lot about, but without info dumps. It's all weaved into the fabric of the different stories we are told.

When Jevick travels to Olondria he's plagued by the ghost of a girl from his own homeland. When his haunting is revealed, he is caught between two religious groups - one who does not believe in the existence of ghosts, and tries to treat Jevick's "condition" as a mental disease, and another who believes he is haunted by and "angel", a creature capable of prophecy and healing, who they want to use in their rituals. Both of them are wrong. There is no help to be found for Jevick in any faction. Through these experiences, his views on both his homeland, and his idolized Olondria, changes.

All the cultures and factions the reader meets in this book has their own taboos and prejudices. They are flawed, but they have power and influence over large groups of people. In Olondria, priests tries to shape Jevick's very real haunting to fit their own world view, and they are not willing to listen to his own account of what it's like. In the Tea Islands, people who are different, sick, or falsely accused of being a witch, are killed, maimed or chased away. The fact that these world views and belief systems are so different from each other, and sometimes direct opposites, makes it very clear that this is simply culture, and not the truth about how the world works. There is a lot of superstition, rituals and different believes in A Stranger In Olondria, but very little real magic.

I love that this book didn't go for a simple solution, like finding a magic item to solve all problems. This is a complex world, and just like real life, its full of different people with different agendas trying to get a piece of you. In the face of your society's misconceptions and prejudices, personal ties, like those of friendship and family, becomes your only refuge and chance of escape.

[Para (wanderer) · Rating 4 out of 5]

And with this, I am done with the 2020 r/Fantasy Bingo!

The Winged Histories is one of my all-time favourites, so I was incredibly curious how would the first book in the series (really, the two can be read in any order) compare. I’m all for literary fantasy with lovely prose, so that I would like it to at least some extent was pretty much a given, but I still far prefer its sequel.

It is dangerous to build. Once you have built something – something that takes all your passion and will – it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don’t realize that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom – something, which, later, will make you suffer.

Structurally, this is much more of a traditional novel than The Winged Histories. It follows one character, Jevick, as he travels from his island country to Olondria and becomes haunted by the ghost of a girl along the way who demands to write her a book. His efforts to get himself rid of the ghosts compared with some of the Olondrians viewing the ghosts as angels and therefore sacred gets him into quite a lot of trouble.

Jevick is never really a central protagonist, a driver of events in the traditional sense. He is much more the type who gets caught in the current of something much larger than himself. But that doesn’t mean he’s passive and his motivation is clear: initially to travel to Olondria, the contry he heard so much about, then the need to get rid of the ghost/angel haunting him overpowers all else. And even as a catalyst, he does have impact on Olondrian history.

Another large theme of the book are books themselves, and the power they have. Jevick’s love of reading, his ghost wanting a book written about her, the books forbidden and burned by Olondria’s new religion, various mentions of Olondrian classical literature, it’s very much a book about books.

Unfortunately, its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. It’s so focused on prose that I found it hard to stay engaged. The narrative style made it feel distant and what worked in The Winged Histories, which is much more fragmented and experimental in structure, did not quite work here. It felt empty in a strange way, like it was missing something. I’m not sure what – the main components are all there. But I struggled.

Still, if you’re looking for literary fantasy, it might be worth a read.

Enjoyment: 3/5
Execution: 4/5

Recommended to: fans of literary fantasy and books about books, prose lovers
Not recommended to: those looking for a fast-paced, engaging read

More reviews on my blog, To Other Worlds.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably the most beautifully written book I've read this year. As a narrative, though, it's much more problematic and uneven. It starts with an excellent rendition of the narrator's childhood; becomes a travel narrative (with some odd ticks that reminded me a lot of 18th century writing, particularly extensive descriptions of locations where the narrator seems almost absent); a mostly unconvincing story of political conflict; cultimating in a powerful, tragic love story that doesn't take up nearly as many pages as i'd like.

I really appreciate the setting, but what worked best for me were moments of very strong feeling and characterization: particularly character portraits of the narrator's mother and father; the failed romance of his tutor; the daughter of a priest; a young girl who's become the head of a peasant household. Unfortunately, even the most interesting characters never spend long on the page, as this is largely a book taken up with descriptions of places and occasionally the things that happen in them.

The style started out like a very refined take on fantasy diction and eventually transitioned into the relentless hyper-lyricism I associate with books published in the small press, which works both for and against it. The love story at the center of the book, when it finally hits, is painfully well rendered--but like a lot of the different parts of this novel, it's confined to about 30 pages, where the books crests beautifully... then deflates with an ending that felt mostly unconvincing to me.

I had huge expectations for this book and I'd say it met them in some ways but not so much in others--which is always the danger, I think, of going into anything expecting to be impressed by it. But this is still a remarkable book in a lot of ways, and I definitely think I'll read Somatar's next book as well. And to I'd especially recommend it to any readers primarily interested in beautiful language, since there's so much of it on every page here.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very particular kind of fantasy novel, as much a literary (filled with albeit imaginary books) novel as it is a deep travelogue between two richly imagined fantasy lands.

At first, I was put off by the oh so lengthy passages of works and legends and overlong paragraphs, but like a lot of great fiction, it takes a learning curve and it often takes a bit of patience. Once I fell into the actual story rather than the many allusions made of whole cloth from a new mythology both familiar to us and strange, it became much easier to read.

The fact is: there's an awful lot to love in this novel as long as you're a lover of myths, stories within stories within stories, and don't mind being thrown into the mind of a heavy reader and eventually the mind of a heavy writer that is literally spurned on to write by the demonic exhortations of a ghost he eventually learns to love.

And don't think this is an entirely dry novel, either, because it eventually has some startling surprises and import for the land he's visiting. It's hard being a holy man, especially if you're a tourist, but it shouldn't be any kind of surprise that tourists will eventually return home and bring along tales and change.

It's a very satisfying novel if you can get through it, but be forewarned, it's dense with words and myth. It's a true work of the imagination, drilling deep and deeper and deeper into the two worlds that had been written.

Take your time, too. You'll be glad you did. :)

[Amal El-Mohtar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book. I am going to write a super long review of this book and eventually link to it here because, this book.

If you love books, and languages, and literatures, and complexity, and a lingering love of tactile detail, you will adore this book.

[Roslyn]

It’s taken me a while to figure out what to say about 'A Stranger in Olondria'. I had (once again – this seems to be happening a lot for me lately in my reading experience) very mixed feelings about it.

I found it a hard slog to get through this book, at least until about the halfway mark, and again after that, until near the end. The prose is exquisite – gorgeous, intricate, lush, rich. The problem was that for me, it was so dense that it was like hacking through thick vegetation. Rather than enhance the telling of the story, it detracted from its power – a case of too much of a good thing.

On the other hand, what happens around the halfway mark (it's been a while since I read it – it might have been earlier or later) really took my breath away. The interesting thing is that the gorgeous language worked at that point. The telling and the story were mutually enhanced. After that, it was all vegetation again until the resolution, which took my breath away again and made me cry. There is a certain irony in all of this because the novel, through both its story and the way it’s told, is an exploration of the the importance and role of books and writing. I’d love to read another version of the novel, one in which some of the vegetation is cut back in order to emphasise the very real power of the novel.

None of the friends I lent the book to even made it to the first plot development, which I think is an enormous shame, as the story this novel tells is a powerful one.

[X · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. It is written so beautifully - the kind of book you want to read out loud - and I loved the story, which wasn’t at all what I expected from the summary or the first few chapters. The ending was incredibly moving.

This book has such the feel of classic fantasy - the made-up words, the feudal setting, the imagined cultures - and it IS that, perfectly, but it’s not restricted by that.

I know this won multiple awards - but how is it not more well-known?!

[Zara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece.

RTC.

[L'encre de la magie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bon et bien c'est un gros gros gros gros coup de foudre ❤️
🏆Top 1 2023 ex aequo

Avis Lecture 🧐📖"Un Étranger en Olondre", par Sofia Samatar 🌴📚
Résumé dans les slides suivantes ➡️
Story a la une pour plus de détails 🧐
@jailu_editions @argylleditions
Gros coup de foudre ⚡💗 TOP 1 ex aequo pour 2023 jusqu'à maintenant.🥹

Dire que j'ai été envoûté est un doux euphémisme ! J'ai carrément été transcendé, dès les premières lignes de ce roman.
Comment ne pas l'être avec cette prose sublime, ce style envolé et cette manière de nous conter le récit, si proche de Le Guin et Terremer 🥹💗?! J y vois aussi une touche de McMaster Bujold, dans l'aspect philosophique des personnages et les questions existentielles qui les assaillent, mais également dans l'histoire de Jevick qui me fait beaucoup penser à Penric chez Bujold.
Pour autant, ce livre ne plaira pas à tout le monde. C'est un roman d'ambiance et de voyage, une quête philosophique, où les étapes comptent finalement plus que la destination. C'est un roman d'Amour, un cri d'amour à la littérature, au verbe, aux mots et surtout aux livres... aux "vallons" comme ils sont nommés ici, objet sacré, dont l'auteur et les personnages continuent de vivre bien après la mort de leur créateur. Car un livre c'est l'immortalité ! 💖

Sofia Samatar nous offre un roman architectural ou chaque brique est une histoire et le ciment un conte ou une poésie. Chaque mot est soigné, posé à sa juste place. Sans fioriture. Mise en abîme de l'histoire, à la manière de poupées russes, l'autrice nous révèle combien tout est lié, connecté et que la vie d'un personnage est bien plus que la somme de ses propres expériences, mais qu'elle possède aussi une part des rencontres faites en chemin. On peut y voir un parallèle entre Jevick et les auteurs, hantés eux aussi finalement par leurs personnages, les suppliants de livrer leur histoire.

Ce récit, c'est la découverte d'un monde, une découverte qui se vit, comme ces textes d'avant, ceux qui avaient une âme et qui nous emportaient avec émerveillement au travers de leurs pages. C'est une expérience de lecture qui m'a rappelé que le meilleur d'hier est encore possible aujourd'hui, que le feu brûle encore chez de nombreux auteurices et que la magie des mots existe toujours...🥹💗

[heidi · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the surface, this book is a love song to books wrapped in a coming-of-age-travel-story. Jevick is an overeducated misfit when he goes to Paris, er Bain, to carry on the family business, but he is much more interested in the culture than the business. In the process of his cultural education, he comes down with a bad case of ghost. Travails ensue.

It's not that I don't love ornate imagery and fabulous language. It's that by 3/4 of the way through this book, I was longing for something to cut the greasy, heavy, oleaginous feeling of the adjectival piles that litter the story. It feels to me like it could be a much more emotionally engaging story if it weren't paced with two adjectives per noun. I'm sure that's a personal preference issue, because I know a lot of people who enjoyed the ornate filigree of the writing.

I think my favorite part is the end, when he takes all his frustrated passion and turns it around into something that improves the world. But I almost gave up halfway through because the pace was so hard for me.

Read if: You are looking for a Gentleman's Progress And Return Home story, if you love a good unrequitable love story or three, if you want to think about nameless spices that can kill on the wind and be bought in the market.

Skip if: You are an impatient reader, you are going to feel bad about having to use a dictionary to read a book. (For the first time in three or so years, I used my kindle dictionary. "Marmoreal -- made of or relating to marble.")

[bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

extremely classic 70s-feeling fantasy-- starts [isabel vc] at the tender age of zero, and in beautiful prose describes meticulously every possible thing that can be seen, tasted, or thought. but, or maybe because of this, strangely impersonal and unbelievably slow, edging boring. also, it's a book about books, which is rough for me, but also, it's a book about falling in love with a terrifying ghost, which is ideal for me! so i kept having moments where i was like OH okay here we fucking GO and then where we went was 5k more of ploddingly describing all subsequent experiences, which was frustrating bcs if u could prise out and string together the emotionally vibrant moments of ghosts this would be a staggeringly effective book as well as a technically gorgeous and deeply (overly?) thought-through one

[Liviu Szoke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Din recenzia care va apărea în curând pe blogul editurii Paladin: „Am citit cartea în primul rând cu ochi de cititor. Bogăția limbajului este formidabilă, nici nu mă mir că acest volum a fost o adevărată vedetă răsfățată a premiilor și nominalizărilor la premii în anul în care a apărut. Parcă de nicăieri a apărut această Sofia Samatar, arătându-le tuturor că se poate scrie și altfel de fantasy, în care nu au loc măceluri nejustificate, nu apar nici dragoni, nici nu se dau bătălii pe viață și pe moarte.
Cititorul din mine a strâmbat adesea din nas, văzând că parcă nu se întâmplă nimic, că se bate pasul pe loc, că necazurile se țin scai de capul lui Jevick, că nimeni nu-l înțelege, că îngerul care-i bântuie visele și-i zdruncină mintea și așa nițel instabilă nu e lucru curat. La fel consideră și gazda, ce-l dă pe mâna unui soi de vrăjitor ca să-l exorcizeze și să-l readucă pe drumul cel bun. Prin lectură, nici mai mult, nici mai puțin, probabil cea mai plăcută formă de tortură posibilă.
Apoi, am citit povestea cu ochi de traducător. Știu, deformație profesională ireversibilă, de care pesemne că n-am să mă mai vindec niciodată. Cred că a fost un chin pentru traducătoare să găsească și să potrivească toate epitetele și metaforele inventate de limba engleză și să le adapteze ca să sune firesc și în limba română. Un limbaj luxuriant, descrieri prelungi, paragrafe întinse pe pagini întregi, tone de adjective, de pietre prețioase și semipreţioase, cuvinte inventate, obiceiuri bizare, ritualuri sacre și o poveste de dragoste ce transcende vremurile și tărâmurile material și imaterial, de toate astea și de multe altele avem parte în poate cel mai neobișnuit roman fantasy citit de mine în ultima vreme.”

[Francesca Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jervick, from the Tea Islands, is not only a stranger in Olondria, he’s a stranger in his homeland, too: someone educated in and besotted with the culture of a faraway land, schooled in letters in an oral society, able to recognize and make Olondrian allusions and references but bored by and ashamed of the place where he grew up. After his father dies, he travels to Olondria and briefly gets to experience the heady cosmopolitan existence he has dreamed of, in the consequence- andimpact-free way strangers are both permitted and limited to. It’s kind of like being a ghost.

Except that in Olondria, ghosts—or angels, as they are called there—do have an impact, as Jervick discovers when one attaches herself to him, transforming him into a dangerous—and endangered—player in Olondrian current events.

So that story unfolds around Jervick, but what captured me was the ghost Jissavet, her history, and everything that her haunting of Jervick represented. Like Jervick, she’s from the Tea Islands, but where Jervick has had every advantage, Jissavet grew up poor and without status, but sharp as a tack, always chafing at her constraints—until she became ill with a disease whose sufferers become pariahs. Her mother took her to Olondria in hopes of a miraculous cure. She died there.

Jervick met her once in life: they sailed on the same ship to Olondria.

Now that she’s dead, Olondrians—some of them, anyway—want her, through Jervick, to provide them with oracular knowledge and blessings. Jervick, at least initially, simply wants to be free of her. For her part, Jissavet has no interest in Olondrian petitioners or anything else Olondrian. There’s just one thing about Olondria that means anything to her: books, and what they make possible. She wants Jervick to memorialize her in a book so that she’ll live on the way Ravhathos the Poet, Elathuid the Voyager, and Firdred of Bain have.

He scoffs at this idea at first:

Write her a book, set her words down in Olondrian characters! This ghost, this interloper speaking only in Kideti!

There’s cultural snobbery and classism in his reaction, but also a simple failure to realize that the technology of writing in Olondrian characters can be separated from the Olondrian language. People in our own world sometimes suffer from the same misapprehension: they confuse scripts with languages—but you could use the Arabic alphabet to write out Cherokee, if you wanted to, or Inuktitut syllabics to write out Cantonese, and so on.

Eventually Jervick realizes this and gives in to Jissavet’s demand. What a portrait and life he records. Jissavet is quite unlikeable in some ways, and yet so very sympathetic. She’s such a real person. Arrogant and cruel, but also generous, imaginative, and deeply insightful. The same Jissavet who’s contemptuous of her mother and bossy with her childhood playmate sings to her grandmother, holds her peace to spare her parents’ feelings, charms sailors. She’s so full of life, and then her illness steals her future from her.

The rage was already coming over me, the desolation, the covetousness, for life, any kind of life … It was as if I already knew what would happen, that we would be separated, [my friend] and I, that she would go into life, marry, have children, and grow old, and I would spend a few seasons stretched in the doorway.

(It may sound strange, but one thing I noticed and appreciated in A Stranger in Olondria was the presence and weight of illness, injury, and infirmity. I don’t mean to suggest that the book was some kind of Bruegel painting or hell scroll—not at all. These things are observed and portrayed matter-of-factly, part of the fabric of life along with dishes clattering and smoke rising, and yet with recognition of their tragedy, and that’s what impressed me. It’s a kind of acknowledgement and representation, not for shock value, but because they’re real and significant part of life.)

I think most fundamentally what the story asks is What do you value? What has worth? People’s answers are in sharp contrast. Jervick yearns for Olondria, with its literature and history, but his tutor embraces the rhythms of life in the Tea Islands. Jissavet’s father fled the loveless halls of the wealthy to marry her mother and live in poverty; Jissavet daydreams about the life of grace and ease he abandoned. More: Jissavet, with her lively mind, despises her mother’s foolishness. Her father desperately tries to get her to see her mother in a different light—to value her mother’s other characteristics. While Jissavet lives, she never does, but as she tells her story to Jervick, we can feel her remorse.

I have to finish off by mentioning the lovely writing of A Stranger in Olondria. I loved when Samatar employed it to illuminate some fleeting moment in human behavior. Although children don’t play a huge role in the story, the descriptions of them, of children’s emotions in particular, are perfect. One character describes getting overexcited when a certain guest would arrive:

“I would grow so filled with joy I had to scream; I would leap around the house, too drunk with relief to contain myself, and have to be sent to bed early or even punished. You see, our house was so solemn. There was so little room for play ... I laughed too loudly, I wanted each joke to continue forever.”

And then there are the startling, perfect similes and metaphors—Jissavet, as she’s being carried piggyback up from below-deck: “her bare feet dangled, silent bells.” Or these (about two different people):

She looked wan and remote, as if carved on a fountain.

She was fragile and impermanent as salt. Like salt she would dissolve, lose her substance. And like salt she would flavor everything with a taste that was sharp and amniotic, disquieting and unmistakable.

Or this, in a creation myth, talking about the sea:

Greetings, my daughter. What do you think of this sea?

And Kyomi answered with shining eyes: It is beautiful, like a long fire.

Then the elephant said: Ah! That is because you know only the gods. But if you loved a mortal man, how different it would be! Then this same sea, which is to you and me like a fire, or a great mat woven not of reeds but of lightning, would appear to you gray and flat and even more lifeless than the mud.

Describing someone’s self-exile, Jervick reflects,

I see him with the sweat on his brow which has turned the color of tallow and imagine how he will flee to the ends of the earth, putting the fathomless sea between himself and this sweet, incautious girl, interring himself in a country of alien flowers.

A country of alien flowers. It’s a startling, memorable, beautiful book.

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know what I think about this book. It slips up on you sideways. It would have been stronger, sleeker, suppler as a novella, I keep thinking; it uses too many words. But then, thematically, that's the point; this is a book about taking joy in words, about the dangers of placing too much weight on words, about the impossible need to balance between the wonders of writing and the reality of the flesh and spirit. And you don't get that by being sparing and spartan.

Also, there's plot, and the main character is central and essential to it, but it is not at all central to his life--in fact, he finds it almost irrelevant. That's a neat trick to pull off.

I don't know in the end if I liked this book or not, but I sat on the sofa reading the last 20% straight through without stopping while the light outside my window slowly faded into a beautiful dusk that I could have, should have been watching, and that has to count for something.

[Gabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is very difficult to rate for me.
It is a work of art. The prose is so beautiful that it has a life of its own. Sofia Samatar‘s lush, vivid descriptions of the county of Olondria lets the reader not only see the setting, but feel it, smell it, taste it. Every sense is tickled and activated.

This is a book about books, a story about stories. A poem in novel length with the intangible sensation of a prolonged fever dream.

Yet the story itself drowns in its own beauty. The characters feel detached, hollow. Even though we follow Jevick intimately he never became approachable to me - a kind of soulless beauty. The plot feels like it is happening outside the pages of the book. There is political and religious turmoil going on, yet the reader only glimpses this through a window.

So the story would not get more than 3 stars from me, yet the prose is so outstanding – and I can go along quite some time with only beautiful language on its own – that I will rank it 4 stars.

[Stefan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar was an odd experience. I’d been looking forward to this novel for a long time. In theory, it looked right up my alley. I expected to be blown away. Instead, I ended up abandoning the novel at about the midway point. Yet, even though I gave up on it, there’s also a lot to love about it. I may even find myself going back to it, one day.

Read the entire review on my site Far Beyond Reality!

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, slow-paced, sad. Linear storytelling makes it a more accessible starting point than The Winged Histories.

[Roxana Chirilă · Rating 4 out of 5]

I... what have I read? It was beautiful. Nothing happened. Maybe there was no plot. Maybe there was a plot. Maybe there were too many plots, but they were in the background. The writing was beautiful. It was pure poetry. I will probably never read "A Stranger in Olondria" again, because it was so boring, and that makes me sad, because it was so beautiful and I was engrossed. Or maybe I'll read it again, to see all the stories happen and this time actually notice them.

If you're confused, so am I. I could have rated this anything, from 2 stars to 5, but I settled for 4, because that felt appropriate somehow.

"A Stranger in Olondria" is narrated by Jevick, the younger son of a pepper merchant, who lives on a beautiful island in the south, where the climate is warm. He has a brother who is an idiot (in the psychological sense) and who cannot inherit the business, so he's also the heir to the estate and the business. His father goes once a year to sell pepper in Olondria, the country to the north, past the sea - and one time, he brings Jevick back an Olondrian tutor, Lunre.

Jevick learns about stories and poetry from Lunre, as well as learning his tutor's language, and, when his father dies, he goes to sell pepper in the northern country, as well. And on the ship he meets Jissavet, a fellow islander, a young woman dying of a terminal disease. They part when they reach the shore, Jissavet going to search for a cure, and Jevick to sell pepper.

However, not long before Jevick is supposed to return to the country, he starts being haunted by Jissavet's ghost, who will not let him return until he takes care of her body, abandoned in a strange land, and until he writes her story. Unfortunately for Jevick, being haunted by ghosts is forbidden in Olondria, due to religious reasons, which means he's imprisoned, and there runs into a cult of people who admire those haunted by spirits, entangling him in Olondrian politics, as he tries to make sense of his life and stumbles into the lives of others.

This makes it sound like "A Stranger in Olondria" has a lot of plot, but you really don't get that feeling as you read the novel. The prose is descriptive and poetic, and Jevick doesn't hesitate to quote great authors on the places he visits, nor to describe the foods, colors, spices and people he discovers. It reads like a beautiful travel guide into a fantasy land. And, at one point, after Jevick reached Olondria, this bored me so much that I started reading something else and forgot I was reading this at all.

And then I started reading a collection of fantasy stories, which contained a short story by Sofia Samatar, and her bio mentioned "A Stranger in Olondria", and I remembered to return to the novel before I continued with the stories. I was just about ready to two-star it at the end, even if I was no more than 40% through.

Then it grew on me. Jevick's struggles and the poetry started fascinating me, as did Jissavet. Towards the end, I was hooked, and as stories of various characters unraveled for me, I became fascinated. "A Stranger in Olondria" is a strangely beautiful book, and I'm glad I read it until the end.

Here, have the beginning, it will give you a taste of the style the entire novel is written in>

"As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents. I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart; it is the light the local people call "the breath of angels" and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom. But of all this I knew nothing. I knew only of the island where my mother oiled her hair in the glow of a rush candle, and terrified me with stories of the Ghost with No Liver, whose sandals slap when he walks because he has his feet on backwards."

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea...

The opening paragraph is one of my favorites that I have read so far in 2019.

I have had this on my reading list since 2015. I think I added it originally because it won a World Fantasy Award. I have read five other books that won the WFA award for best novel; my favorite is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I would probably put this one second. (Still on my list for someday: The Bone Clocks, Declare, & The Antelope Wife).

The protagonist is Jevick, a pepper merchant's son. Every year his father travels to the spice markets in Bain, the capital city of Olondria, to sell pepper. When his father dies, Jevick makes the trip for the first time. He becomes haunted by the ghost of a young girl, Jessavet, who demands that he write down the story of her life.

This is not a fast-paced book, especially in the early chapters. Samatar takes her time establishing her setting before important things really start happening, and the fairytale feeling of the first half of the book leads to something darker. There are some political conflicts taking place in Olondria, but because the main character is an outsider who tries to stay out of those things, we don't learn much about what is happening on that front.

This is very much a book about books and reading. Jevick's descriptions of the books he reads are enchanting. The characters often tell stories, and at least one of them would be a great story on its own. And it has some interesting things to say about the experience of reading. I won't get into that here, but Abigail Nussbaum has a long discussion of this issue in her review at her blog, Asking the Wrong Questions.

I liked the characters, but I think that this will be one of those books that I remember primarily for other things: the setting, the writing style, and the ideas. But it is one of the best fantasy novels I have read in the last few years, and I plan on reading the sequel (The Winged Histories) sometime.

[wishforagiraffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a really hard time getting through this book. I had several problems with it, and I think they're all somewhat related. It's a book with a very tight focus, with only one point of view character. Jevick is never at the center of world-shatteringly important events, but he does end up being a catalyst of sorts. The description of the book on the back cover blurb/amazon is somewhat misleading, so the story that you think you're getting and the story that you get are pretty different.
I think it's a book that would be more enjoyable on a re-read, where you know what to expect and can enjoy the book for what it is, instead of what you think it should be. The second half of the book does get better, where the pace picks up and the story gets more focused.

I'd say that this book would probably appeal to readers who enjoy more "literary" fiction. There are strong themes of the importance of stories and slightly less heavy handed themes of cultural alienation throughout the book, so it feels almost like someone's MFA project. The closest comparison I can make is to GGK, which feels a little strange. I love GGK a lot, and I just didn't love this book. The themes are somewhat the same, and so is the style of prose. All in all, I'd say it's a read for if you're looking to challenge yourself.

[Sunil · Rating 4 out of 5]

To read A Stranger in Olondria is to be transported to another world by the sheer power of words, and to be a stranger in Olondria is to be in another world and holding on to the power of words.

I came to this book not knowing anything about it but that one reviewer had described it as "frustrating, beautiful, and memorable," and, as I am an impressionable young lad, that may have colored my impressions, as I've ended up agreeing with him.

The plot is simple: Jevick goes to Olondria (where he is a stranger). He becomes haunted by a ghost. He would like to stop being haunted by said ghost. Also it turns out that people don't take kindly to people who see ghosts. Unless they do. Jevick either does or does not stop being haunted by said ghost, that would be a spoiler.

The prose is so fucking gorgeous I want to die. Sofia Samatar uses words in a way that envelop you like a blanket, a comforting poetry. I felt like she was describing a real place she had been, the sensory detail was so vivid. And because Jevick is a traveler and lover of books, it makes sense that he would describe his journey with such beautiful language, attempting to capture the magic of the place he previously only knew from books.

The lush prose does more than carry the present story, however; it's a story about stories (I LOVE STORIES ABOUT STORIES), and the nested stories pack just as much power. Characters tell their own stories, their own histories; characters tell stories in myth, stories in song. We live on through our stories, and our stories define our culture, and both these themes lie at the heart of the book.

As much as I loved the prose, though, I found that it drew me into the world but not the story, which is relatively thin (see the above plot breakdown). Plenty of lovely scenes, but very little plot movement. And while I did have an affection for Jevick, especially because of his love of books, I felt detached from him as a character since he's almost completely passive: things happen to him, he rarely does things of his own accord. He feels like a vehicle through which we see Olondria most of the time, but I loved all his interactions with the ghost.

Overall, I would recommend the book based on the prose, setting, and themes (beautiful and memorable), rather than the plot and characters (frustrating). I feel like the book will continue to haunt me, though.