Reading John Crowley's Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr discussion

1. Crowley's late style is just as beautiful as ever. This passage pulled me right in.

"I suppose if the People were to describe the Crows to themselves, they might say that the Crows were like a black scarf drawn over the sky reaching from beyond the horizon to the mid-heaven. But the Crows don't see themselves in that way; they don't see themselves as a veil or a mantle or a black bearskin, they see themselves not as a mass but as many..."

2. Some questions about the world building.

- The mountainous dump of the open is just a regular old dump, and people are picking it over, as people do, or are we to think the whole world is a dump now?
- There's pretty bad disease going around?
- The narrator says Dar Oakley had to make his way into Ymr from his own world, and he (the narrator) has to go into Dar Oakley's world to grab his story. He means this literally or just figuratively as a way of talking about stories?

I welcome your thoughts on the above and any other topics.

Should I say spoilers for pages 1-8? But not for anything later.

He's amazing, yes. And maybe hard to quote; I just reread these eight pages for the first time in a year or more, and when I came across what you quoted I thought what a pity not to include--but this says something about Crowley-- the next part, about being one among many.

I'd like to talk about world building, but I've read it before and have definite answers to some of your questions, which would be spoilers.

There's a great economy to the story of Debra: "on a high floor my wife was being treated but not cured."

The thing that floored me in these eight pages was having the narrator learn Dar Oakely's language. Crowley primes you to expect the opposite: a crow, set apart by its marking and its illness and the hostility of its fellows, as solitary and special as the hero of a Bildungsroman (Julien Sorel, set upon by his loutish brothers and father at the outset of The Red and the Black)--a crow as special as that seems to want to speak. "The Crow wanted to stay in order to converse." It's so perfect when he reverses that.

I love the narrative situation at the end of the Prologue. A narrator who is a translator, who can't know whether they translate or fabulate.

Bruno wrote: "Should I say spoilers for pages 1-8? But not for anything later.

He's amazing, yes. And maybe hard to quote; I just reread these eight pages for the first time in a year or more, and when I came ..."

Yes, really great. I love that economy, too. I'm less a spoiler purist than some, so if you want to hint that somebody is on the right track with a thought (or on the wrong path), I wouldn't mind it.