The Habitation of the Blessed

A Dirge for Prester John #1

by Catherynne M. Valente

This is the story of a place that never was: the kingdom of Prester John, the utopia described by an anonymous, twelfth-century document which captured the imagination of the medieval world and drove hundreds of lost souls to seek out its secrets, inspiring explorers, missionaries, and kings for centuries. But what if it were all true? What if there was such a place, and a poor, broken priest once stumbled past its borders, discovering, not a Christian paradise, but a country where everything is possible, immortality is easily had, and the Western world is nothing but a dim and distant dream?

Brother Hiob of Luzerne, on missionary work in the Himalayan wilderness on the eve of the eighteenth century, discovers a village guarding a miraculous tree whose branches sprout books instead of fruit. These strange books chronicle the history of the kingdom of Prester John, and Hiob becomes obsessed with the tales they tell. The Habitation of the Blessed recounts the fragmented narratives found within these living volumes, revealing the life of a priest named John, and his rise to power in this country of impossible richness. John's tale weaves together with the confessions of his wife Hagia, a blemmye--a headless creature who carried her face on her chest--as well as the tender, jeweled nursery stories of Imtithal, nanny to the royal family.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical, Historical Fantasy, Mythology, Science Fiction Fantasy

269 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2010

About the author

Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan.

She currently lives in Maine with her partner, two dogs, and three cats, having drifted back to America and the mythic frontier of the Midwest.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most, if not all, attempts to render this book into something more than just a coherent seedling of the tale and not the tale itself is doomed before it even begins.

As of the tale of Prester John, read from a book that sprouted up from a book tree only to rot even as it is read, I'm lost in a welter of sensations and presentiments and, if the later parts are to be judged higher than the former, I'm forced to call this a supreme work of the imagination.

Only, it's also very firmly rooted in Medieval classics that require no modern quirks of plot or theme, rather, a dedication to getting the thoughts out in whatever shape or form the author deems fit.

It's pretty awesome and quite like any of the early classics I've enjoyed that like to meander and get to their point in their own way in their own time, and this is what happens in spades.

We see this tale from multiple views and worldviews, from modern Enlightenment to the Medieval mindset trying to force reality into a Christian box to the view of angels (though they would deny it) and demons (of which there is no proof).

Fascinating and quite frustrating is one way of putting this book. One must experience it and suffer through its turns in turn, on the hope of being planted or eating a black leaf or of living forever and changing lives in a pleasant fiction of lottery.

Clever and unique and firmly rooted in a classical style, it is, nonetheless, a superb work of the imagination and it fleshes out some of the weirdest vagaries of history. I did imagine, several times as I read this, that I was going to be bombarded with Christian sentiments very much in the tune of Prester John, but amusingly enough, poor John was stymied repeatedly and was, in the end, defeated by the Eden he was set to convert. :)

This is a tiny spoiler for those who might be turned off by their own presentiments. :) For me? I thought it had heart and soul.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely loved Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which is a children's book filled with the madcap ideas crammed into every sentence. The Habitation of the Blessed is an adult fantasy novel filled with the madcap ideas crammed into every sentence, but whereas Fairyland is full of allusions to both traditional fantasy and other children's fantasy literature, Habitation is based on the medieval legend of Prester John. The allusions come fast and furious and unlike traditional fantasy, which has to make some kind of sense, medieval myth and allegory has no such obligation and frequently doesn't.

Valente is gifted with an imagination that few writers can match. It can be exhausting keeping up with her prose, as it is both wildly inventive and beautiful and densely packed with so many allusions, metaphors, and fantastic images that people who scan her prose too quickly will blink and miss something. In medieval legends, Prester John was a mythical king who ruled over a Christian land in far-off India or Africa or one of those pagan places. Valente writes The Habitation of the Blessed from the viewpoint of a 17th century monk who has discovered that the Prester John legend was true. The poor monk's ability to transcribe John's story is limited, because he has found three books which were the fruit of a Book Tree planted in the land John ruled, and like any fruits, they rot and go bad.

Each of the three books tells how John, the naive monk from Constantinople, arrived half-dead in a land where talking lions and eagles and swans coexist with giants and pygmies and even stranger beasts, and set about trying to convert these magical, immortal beings to Christianity. Needless to say, it doesn't go over as he hoped, and yet he eventually becomes king. How this happens slowly unfolds throughout the course of our 17th century monk's transcription, as he reads the account from John's point of view, from that of his wife, a woman who has no head and whose face is in her torso, and from that of an ancient creature who was once nanny to the children of this land's original queen.

There is an entire bestiary of creatures in this book, all of them with strange names you probably aren't familiar with (except gryphons), but all of which come from actual medieval legends. At first I thought Valente was making things up, but no, Google them; she was just taking advantage of her Classics background. Those medieval storytellers made up stranger things than anything Tolkien ever came up with. Valente manages to spin a plausible (yet fantastically weird) society consisting of immortal monsters and angels all coexisting in a land where anything you plant in the ground will become a tree bearing like fruits (i.e., plant a book and you get book trees; plant a bed and you get bed trees; plant a corpse and you get that person "reincarnated" as a tree). But Valente loves her ornate descriptive prose and dialog, and this book is told from half a dozen different POVs spanning relative centuries. It's not nearly as easy a read as Fairyland (or much of anything else). I'll also add that I'm a big fan of audiobooks, but I think this would be a tough one to absorb as an audiobook unless you're willing to really pay close attention to every word.

If you like Arthurian legends, or closer to the time period, the tales of Chaucer, the legends of Roland, Charlemagne, etc., and especially if you like historical fantasy, then you should love this book. It's got the sweet verisimilitude of an author who has done her homework and knows how to write, and I think it's a great experience for any fantasy fan who wants to sample European-flavored fantasy that isn't elves and trolls and dragons. That said, this really was an exhausting read and sometimes I felt like I was reading more a montage of fantastic ideas and word-bling bombarding my brain than a story. I believe Valente has follow-up novels planned, and I can't honestly say whether I'd prefer to read more Prester John or sample something else by her instead.

[Kat Hooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

[Note: I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version of The Habitation of the Blessed read by Ralph Lister. It took me a while to adjust since I have recently listened to Lister read three installments of The Gorean Saga and I at first had a hard time hearing the priest Prester John instead of the sadistic misogynist Tarl Cabot. But I got over this soon enough and thought that Mr. Lister did a great job with this one.]

In The Habitation of the Blessed, Catherynne M. Valente lets her extravagant imagination loose on the 12th century legends of Prester John, the Nestorian Christian priest who set out from Constantinople to search for the tomb of Saint Thomas and ends up as the beloved ruler of Pentexore. This is an ancient land of strange, nearly immortal, creatures who’ve never heard of Jesus Christ and who practice the Abir, a lottery which reassigns them to new lives, jobs, and mates every three hundred years. The Abir staves off boredom, keeps them from being forever ruled by a despot, and allows ambitious folks a chance to be ruler, though it often causes feelings of sadness, loss, and envy, too.

When Brother Hiob von Luzern goes looking for Prester John (who left Constantinople a few hundred years ago and sent his famous letter to the Pope) and finds himself in Pentexore, he’s allowed to pluck and read three books that are growing from a tree as if they were fruit. One book is John’s account of his search for Saint Thomas and his experiences in Pentexore:

"I could not think where I had beached myself. It was as though every story I had ever heard had broken itself on the shores of this place like blind brittle whales and I walked among their shards that could never be made whole again."

The other books were written by a blemmye and a panoti who became close to John. Unfortunately, just like fruit, the books begin to rot, so Hiob decides to alternately copy a chapter from each, hoping to acquire as much information as possible before they disintegrate. Thus, similar to the connected story devices used in some of Catherynne Valente’s other novels, The Habitation of the Blessed is told as four separate intertwining narratives in which we learn about Prester John and the Pentexorians he meets, medieval Roman Catholic Christianity, and the fascinating cultural practices of Pentexore.

If you’ve read Catherynne Valente before, you’ll already have recognized that the Prester John Legends are perfect source material and you won’t be surprised to learn that this tale is full of the kinds of wonderful visual imagery and dreamy ideas that inhabit her other work. She brings a whole new life to the Fountain of Youth, the Gates of Alexander, and the Garden of Eden. Her account of the Tower of Babel is chillingly awesome and made me wish I was talented enough to paint it. In The Habitation of the Blessed you’ll meet gryphons, pygmies, troglodytes, lamia, a sea of sand, warmongering Cranes, and trees that grow maps, diagrams, books, beds, sheep heads, and equipment for medieval warfare. Each of these wonders is lovingly described and packed with personality.

Prester John’s interaction with those he meets is often gently humorous as he subjects these lost (but immortal) souls to Sunday School lessons and sermons about the trinity and transubstantiation and has them conjugate Latin verbs, say Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and pray the rosary. So far, John is learning a lot more about his faith than his students are, but his wide-eyed bewilderment and good-hearted intentions make him a lovable figure. Even Brother Hiob, who’s scandalized by John’s congress with these demons, is a likable character.

The writing is luxuriant, as always, and the dialogue is often reminiscent of the delightful repartee found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I couldn’t help but laugh at the peacock historian who, after the most recent Abir, was assigned to be a fiction writer. He laments that now he has to make up ridiculous stuff that never happened and must work with motifs, metaphors, and themes (“What rot!”).

Also, as usual for a Valente novel, there are plenty of interesting ideas to chew on. As Hiob the monk reads the three books, he experiences the same crises of faith that John and Thomas suffered previously. Is Pentexore the Garden of Eden? Prester John seems to think so when he says “This is the country God kept for men before we fell,” yet if Pentexore is paradise, there would be no need for the Abir. Do nearly immortal creatures need redemption? Would we really want to be immortal on Earth? What does the land of Pentexore, a rich and sensual place, mean for the faith of medieval Christian monks? Did God intend for His followers to take vows of poverty and chastity and to withdraw from society or does He mean for us to experience and engage with the magnificent things He’s made? If God has given souls to those we consider monsters, how are we to treat these monsters? And, if we were wrong about the monsters, where else may we have misjudged God?

[Megan Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"That is the purpose of stories, that no matter where we walk in the world, we walk twice."
- Catherynne Valente

There are very few authors who inspire me to note quotes while I'm reading. Catherynne Valente is one of them. And this is the one that made me stop, write it down, then continue, because it speaks so strongly to my experience as a reader, and to how my life has been formed and enriched by books.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Amal El-Mohtar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is what I wrote to the author upon finishing this book:

Today I finished reading The Habitation of the Blessed. I love it. This was a book that I approached with some caution, having so loved the short story, having so loved your reading of one of Imtithal's chapters, having felt so near to its construction and so far from its execution -- like you were always speaking to me from that land while asking me for words to seed that rich earth. To read this book, Cat, was to find paths of our conversations twisting and turning, lined with fruit-bearing word-trees that knew me as I knew them.

The truth of things, the depth of them. I kept reading it and thinking this, too, yes, this. I kept thinking of what I wanted to say about it while reading it, and then forgetting what I wanted to say as I read the next sentence, because I couldn't hold this whole world of yours, had to let it run a river through me while I tried to sip it.

At first, I read it slowly. I had to learn its shape, because it was clear to me from the beginning that Hiob's story was not a frame so much as its own fragment. Learning that was important. Reading it was like gathering two armfuls of sand towards me, and then finding as grain piled on grain that there were things to be unearthed from it, that there was a wholeness in these fragments, and how beautiful, how heartbreaking it was to see the narratives knitting together in perfect time to the decay of the texts that held them. And by that point I was reading as quickly as and with an urgency sympathetic to Hiob's.

It's just so brilliant, Cat. It's so brilliant, and so beautiful, and so full of grace.

I love that the bodies of the Blemmye force you to see a person in a body -- that to be a female Blemmye is to forego ever saying "dude, my eyes are up here," because it is impossible to look at breasts without them looking back. It is impossible to make an object, a commodity, of such a body.

I love that trees are made up of people. I love that you have seeded your world with Alexander and Sappho and Saint Thomas. I love the balance of the narratives, I love how every single character fascinates me and makes me want to know them, even John, who is infuriating.

Theotokos is Hagia's daughter, isn't she? I can't wait to hear her voice telling stories, as I think she must in books to come.

I love the Crusades as invented by a peacock with my brother's name.

Cat, I can't even say all I want to say in the length of an e-mail. I love this book that hurt you so much to make, and I want to read more in this world. The things you said in it. This -- this, I think, crystallised in me more than anything else:

That is the purpose of stories, that no matter where we walk in the world, we walk twice: once in the warm sunshine, and once in the silvery light of every tale we have ever heard, seeing each thing as it is, and also as it was.

That is why your mother brought me from Nimat when you were but babies, all the way down the long roads lined in yellow flowers, along the blue river, all full of stones. So that you would know how to walk twice, and so that your stride would be kind.

To walk twice. And I think of The Waste Land, and how you will always be this other walking always beside me no matter where you are, because your words are with me, and I eat the fruit of your book trees and they seed in me and send up shoots through me, and reading your books is to practice some strange, alchemical horticulture of the heart.

I love you, and I love this book so much. Thank you.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all of Valente’s works, this reminds me of The Orphan’s Tales, the way there are multiple stories that are loosely connected in an overarching narrative. But somehow, it is much more intricate, and I was drawn in by this tree of books that is encountered early on by Brother Hiob of Lucerne. The interweaving stories in the book come from this tree, but they may act more like fruit than paper.

“This tree bore neither apples nor plums, but books, where fruit should sprout. The bark of its great trunk shone the color of parchment; its leaves a glossy vibrant red, as if it had drunk up all the colors of the long plain through its roots. In clusters and alone, books of all shapes hung among the pointed leaves, their covers obscenely bright and shining, swollen as peaches, gold and green, and cerulean, their pages thick as though with juice, their silver ribbon marks fluttering in the spiced wind.”

"Infinity is not a matter of outward space, but inward depth. We all of us spiral in, and in, and in, towards the spark of divinity buried at our core. And this slow spiral has no end."

My imagination was captured in that moment, and it only got better. The creatures in this book are bizarre and enchanting, and stretch the limitations of the reader alongside Brother Hiob. It is impossible not to start longing for the imaginary landscape of Pentexore, and I look forward to the future books in this world.

Ralph Lister also does a wonderful job with the audio, and the subtle differences in voices help the listener know where one is within the story. (see my longer review on SFF Audio)

[[Name Redacted]]

*sigh* According to the book's summary, the premise is that the Kingdom of Prester John did exist and everything reported about it was true. That summary then goes on to say that it's not a Christian kingdom, but rather blah blah blah blah. Right away I'm rolling my eyes. Given that the KEY FACTOR IN THE ACCOUNTS OF THE KINGDOM OF PRESTER JOHN was that it was a CHRISTIAN KINGDOM, then obviously everything reported about it WASN'T true according to this novel. I hate clumsy attempts at twists.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to New Testament apocrypha, Saint Thomas, the Christian apostle who famously refused to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead (hence, doubting Thomas), is believed to have sailed to India in the middle of the first century AD to spread the Good Word among the ancient Jewish communities of the Malabar Coast. There he established the first Christian church in Asia, the Church of the East, also known as the Nestorian Church, which survived nearly 1,500 years until a schism in the 16th century.

About a thousand years after Thomas started his church, in the centuries that followed the Carolingian Renaissance, Europeans slowly began to explore the Asian continent and to likewise receive visitors from the east. The crusades had already been bringing a sizeable number of Europeans into Asia and the Middle East on a fairly regular basis, and almost a century before Marco Polo’s famous journey monks and papal diplomats such as André de Longjumeau, William of Rubruck, Friar Julian and others trekked into Asia, bringing back accounts that captured public imagination for this distant land.

Enter Prester John, a legendary (and completely fictional) priest king of the east who seems to have sprang organically into public consciousness sometime in the 10th or 11th century, just as the far east was entering medieval European consciousness. Saint Thomas was never quite forgotten, and the stories of a Christian king controlling a large, rich kingdom in farthest Asia, quite possibly the same land where Thomas founded his church (which therefore tied John to this close confidant of Jesus Christ) became very popular throughout Europe.

I think of Prester John sort of like the way I think of the stories of interplanetary space travel and alien civilizations that tantalized public imagination at the dawn of the space age. Our entry into space opened up a vast landscape of possibility that we filled in with stories strange civilizations and alien creatures. Prester John stories did the same thing, filling the vast, unknown lands beyond the Bosphorus with strange creatures, magic, and a Christian king to rule them all. In a way, Prester John was part Martian Chronicles, part Michael Valentine Smith, part War of the Worlds, or something like that.

One of the brilliant things about The Habitation of the Blessed, which takes the legends of Prester John as its starting point, is that, rather than portray the creatures that populate this distant land as strange, foreign others, we experience their life in this fantastical world through their eyes, giving us an intimacy with their experience of this world that fantasy authors rarely grant readers. This is a 180 degree turn from the way these stories began; instead of gawping at the strangeness of foreign lands, nursing a tantalizing kind of fear, Valente has us falling in love with these strong, sincere creatures and the intricate society they have built.

The Habitation of the Blessed is a novel of books: the frame story is “The Confessions of Hiob von Luzern, 1699,” a first person account of a monk’s travels to India (perhaps retracing Saint Thomas's steps) in search of the fabled Kingdom of Prester John, the stories of which had been bubbling through European medieval public imagination for more than 500 years by that point.

Despite being an appealing character, with a prose style somewhere between Saint Augustine and (in small bits towards the end) Charles Kinbote, Hiob’s role is little more than cipher: in response to a question about Prester John, a local woman shows Hiob a tree that grows books instead of fruit. He allowed to harvest only three, and these three books, which he sets about translating as they slowly rot, form the core of the story. The books are: “The Word in Quince,” written by Prester John and recounting journey east from Constantinople “to the brink of the world” and the strange world he finds there; “The Book of the Fountain,” an account of the life of a Blemmyae (a humanoid creature with no head whose face is in its chest) named Hagia, who eventually marries Prester John; and “The Scarlet Nursey,” the account of a Panoti (a type of small humanoid creature with massive ears) who is the caretaker of three royal children.

The sincerity with which this novel takes each of these three characters' narratives is one of its many virtues. I can’t help but feel that someone like, say, China Mieville, given the same material, would make tragically flawed monsters of these characters rather than the heart-felt, sympathetic renderings they are given here. Even in Umberto Eco's Baudolino, in which the fantasy kingdom comes to life in the last third of the book, Eco’s rendering of the kingdom of Prester John is fairly conventional and a little thin compared to the character-rich, sensuously vivid world we encounter in The Habitation of the Blessed.

The three narratives, with occasional interruptions by Hiob, are braided together to form a fascinating story of this vividly imagined world which, we are to believe, briefly coextisted with our own for a time.

Because the narrative structure is somewhat complex—three POV narratives encapsulated in the master narrative of the monk, Hiob, who is translating these three stories into his tongue—the actual story takes a little time to gel. It wasn’t until somewhere past page 100 that this book became difficult to put down. But at least it got to that point, which separates it from 90% of the novels I read.

[Meggan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So we know that Habitation of the Blessed is about the legend of Prester John. But it could also be a radical re-interpretation of Wonders of the East, the book of marvels written around 1000 AD detailing a race of disfigured humans that Alexander was thought to have encountered in his travels to India. Here's an excerpt from it, featuring some of the "grotesques" (panotii, blemmye, and amyctrya) that are humanized so poignantly by Valente in her novel:



See how static and placid they are? How they're framed as if on a shelf in some collector's menagerie? That's the way that Empire constructs and handles monstrosity: by attempting to contain it. Call it propaganda published by the true "monsters."

Valente inverts the Orientalism of Wonders of the East in many ways (thank god), one of which is by preventing the monks in search of John's legends from succeeding in transcribing the full story. Because even if they did read it, they'll never fully know it. And some of the characters Valente creates (Hagia, for one) just don't deserve to be in some pope's boutique.

Another way she inverts Orientalism is by making the Christian hero, John, a grotesquerie himself. The inhabitants view John's zeal as childlike and deranged. And he views them like a typical missionary--conversion material to redeem his own sins. However, my inept description paints John in a very broad brush. In fact I really enjoyed his characterization because he's just as flawed, sympathetic, and surly as the rest of the wondrous creatures he encounters. That some described John as the "villain" of the novel made me re-think my feelings of abject pity toward him. I have a hunch he'll send his kingdom to fight in the Holy Wars in the next book. If that happens, his villainy is well deserved.

The fact that a century-long hoax is the impetus for this novel is neat. That the hoax became legend conveys the desire for a Christian Empire that could never quite penetrate the East like the pagan conquerors of old. Essayist Nate Barksdale brings up an interesting point about how this envy invented John's kingdom: "What better way to argue that one could be as powerful as Alexander and still be Christian than simply to manufacture a Christian Alexander—and one so humble, incidentally, that he let no man call him King, but only priest or Presbyter?" The hilarious thing about Valente's interpretation of the hoax is that she imagines John "the person" as real but John "the great Apostle of the East" as a fraud. So was it all a hoax anyway?

Finally, there is a theme here that I can't quite temper into clarity, but I'm going to think on it as I read Book II. It's about the way that "the inconceivable" in fantasy flummoxes reality, imagination, and faith. Seeing, imagining, or believing means boxing the impossible into the possible. I now realize why Borges' Imaginary Beings wasn't an interesting read: it could have been much more radical if these encyclopedia entries had been allowed to tell their own stories like they do in Valente's book. She made me think about how miracles, monsters, resurrection, eternal life, gryphons, phoenixes, and talking trees don't need to be thrown together in a butterfly collection to show us the strangeness of things. Books like this are not about what we can imagine, see, or believe, but about what we can't.

[Saphana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally posted this review as a guest on Elfy's blog "Travels Through Iest" when the book came out. For more exposure, I'm going to copy/paste my review here. On the same note: Elfy hosts a great variety of book-reviews, so if you are interested ...

----- Review: ----

Let me start with the superficial: this is a very well made book. The cover art actually matches the contents. The book is made of thick, very smooth paper, that feels soft to the touch. The edges are crafted to look as if the pages have been ripped out of another spine (or are they on the verge of decaying? Read on to understand the origin of this question) - and the ink does not smear. Night Shade Books put some effort into the appearance, which is pleasing to the eyes and fingers of the reader from the first touch.

When I started to read, I needed more than 2 hours for the first 30 pages and suddenly became aware, that I was not enjoying this: I kept looking for hidden meanings, foreshadowings, prohecies, intrigue and it then became clear to me, that I have been doing this all wrong. So back to page 1 - reboot - and just relax, let Mrs Valente (yes, she's married now) take the lead and just enjoy the ride she's about to take you on.
And what a ride it was.

The Habitation of the Blessed describes the end of Hiob's journey, sent out by his church to follow the Indus to it's source, bringing back news of riches for the church to exploit, preferably the hidden kingdom of Prester John - and while at it, do some missionary work - in the form of Hiob's written confession, dated 1699.

In a village in the province of Lavapuri, Hiob's dwindling party finds the first word to their goal. A woman takes Hiob to a tree on which grow books. He is allowed to pick three. He spends the following day(s) and night(s) reading them in turn, translating and transcribing them. Soon he learns, that the books are decaying rapidly, like fruit - which leads him into a reading frenzy.

The first book contains the story of John, the last letter of who in 1165 details his 'kingdom`, thusly leading to Hiob's expedition; chronicled by his wife Hagia, a blemmye (a people that have their faces on their chests).

The second book tells Hagia's own story.

The third covers the tale of Imthithal, a Panoti (a people with very large, white ears), nurse to the royal children.

All three interweave in the history of John reaching Pentexore after having crossed a sea of sand, the Rimal in a powerful prose - every word just so - spilling out an overflow of imagination that borders on madness, sweeping you along to the point where you start eating that damn Mango you had lying around for a couple of days, only to realise that the smell that has been disturbing you for a while wasn't from your fruit - it was her's, the written ones, slowly decaying.

The beauty of Mrs Valente's writing defies being put in words. Strand for delicate strand she unravels belief, religion and the benefits of life eternal in slow, moving sentences - almost poetry. Here's an artist, the likes of which we are not going to see anytime soon again.

This volume ends with all three of the books already rotten to mush. It leaves you wanting more, and soon. According to Mrs Valente, her husband checked her into a hotel somewhere in the wilderness of Maine, so she was closeted to wrestle this beast down. He might have to do so again - well, I certainly wish both of them all the best - but if it takes a little isolation for Mrs Valente, so I can lay may hands on the next volume - I'm not going to stop her husband.

[Danielle The Book Huntress · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to say right now, except this was a very good book. I'd recommend being open minded about religion if you read it.

Reviewed for Bitten by Books.com: http://bittenbybooks.com.

[Dorothea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is made of some of my favorite ingredients:

1. It's a book about books and reading: translating, writing, reading, storytelling, listening, even transcribing.

2. It's got all kinds of wordplay about this, particularly a gorgeous, complicated conceit about composition and decomposition -- the sort of thing that reminds me of the happiest and most fantastical lectures I attended while studying early modern English literature.

3. Some of the characters are from a recognizable history of the early church -- hooray, I remember learning about this! iconoclasm, the nature of Christ -- it's fun for me to read about fictional characters who are contemporary to these debates.

4. And lastly, it's a whole symphony based on part of the bizarre, self-centered, symbolic, and sometimes very beautiful medieval Christian ideas about far-away places. I haven't properly studied such ideas, but I have just for fun read works such as the Ancren Riwle (that's one way of spelling it!), which is supposed to be a guide book for anchorites who wall themselves up in small spaces in order to live a most holy life, but contains facts such as: the pelican is an allegory for Christ because mother pelicans cut their own breasts in order to feed their young on blood. And I did take a history class on the medieval church, in which I learned how medieval Europeans thought of the Crusades. They believed that the truth of Christianity was evident everywhere, and therefore that any other kind of religion was not what we think of, simply another religion, but a heresy -- deliberate perversion of universal truth. This kind of worldview, which is so simple and so very remote from my own perceptions, fascinates me.

At the beginning of reading The Habitation of the Blessed, the more I realized that it was made up of these things I love, the more I worried that the mixture of these things would disappoint me.

I think it's Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories" that describes the logic of fairyland, which isn't logic at all, but certain causes and effects that happen simply because they must. Too much explanation kills a fairytale. I worried that too much explanation would also kill a blemmye.

But then, a fairytale, or even a whole tree of fairytales, is not a novel. For me to care about a blemmye or a panoti as protagonist, I do need to know and understand her as a person, by some means more than the fairytale "that's how it was."

And particularly, for the story of Prester John, I wanted a very precise balance of explaining well and not explaining too much.

I wanted the motivations of the European Christians to be historically accurate. But I very, very much didn't want the inhabitants of Pentexore to be historically accurate, geographically accurate, or accurate or faithful to anything at all except, to some degree, the imaginations of the medieval Europeans who first sketched them on a map.

Most of all, I did not want Pentexore to be locatable on any modern map. For them to be obviously superimposed on any region of Africa, India, or eastern Asia would maybe have ruined the whole book for me.

Why? Because they're imaginary -- and they're the products of European imagination* (whether Europeans travelling and wildly interpreting things that didn't fit well into their worldview, or Europeans at home and making things up). To most Europeans at home, Prester John or the Antipodes or blemmyae might well have been fairyland.

[* Now that I type this, I'm wondering: how generally true is that? My ideas about these legends are not systematic, but generalized from a few examples, whose context I don't completely grasp. Perhaps the inhabitants of the lands that were the object of these fancies had more agency than I thought in the imagining process. In that case, my reaction to this book might well be quite different...]

I wanted to keep these fancies in fairyland, and not try to accommodate them to real, lived history of actual people in Northern Africa, the Middle East, or Asia during the time of the story. Or much worse, to accommodate these people's history and stories to Prester John... this would be a terrible insult to those people, their history, stories, and descendents, to pretend for the sake of this novel that there was truth in these legends and that the people with their faces on their torsos were in fact medieval Africans or Asians. Or to try to squash legends together, to find something in common between European Christianity's Prester John and a contemporaneous figure from Africa or Asia -- surely that can be done, but who could do it well?

Rather, I wanted Pentexore to be an imaginary land, some place that lives today only as a story, like Atlantis. Or, some place that exists on some maps, but only in a crease: at first you see the familiar world laid out flat, but tug the edges apart again and Pentexore suddenly unfolds. (The title of the sequel, "The Folded World," suggests this -- but I've already peeked inside and I'm worried: instead of the vague and borderless map in The Habitation of the Blessed, The Folded Map has an easily recognized map of the Arabian and Indian peninsulas.)

Anyway, those were my worries but, at least in The Habitation of the Blessed, they were not realized. Unless I missed them, there are no geographical referents that tie Pentexore to a particular region of the real world. I am certain I missed many intertextual references, but I think that Valente did avoid joining the Pentexoreans to any real culture. Of course, to John's bafflement and dismay, they are not Christian. They encountered the Greeks through "Alisaunder," Alexander the Great, but know no Latin at all; the name of the griffin Fortunatus is, apparently, unrelated. Likewise, they don't know "Saracens," which crosses John's mind when he meets a character whose name is Hajji.

So the Pentexoreans are not unhappily superimposed on some real, historical group of people. Valente also, I think, managed a perfect balance between fairyland logic and the needs of a novel; and she satisfied me also as to the accuracy of early Christian characters' concerns.

So, as I realized these things, I was free to relax and enjoy the story: to love Imtithal, to worry about Hagia, to hold myself in reserve as to John and his preconceptions, to absolutely delight (and at the same time hold my breath) in the story of Hiob and the books he plucked from a tree...

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Valente takes the legend of Prester John, the Christian King of the Far East, and runs with it. Her premise is to suppose that every outlandish creature encountered in these tales was true: the people with no heads but faces in their bodies, the people with one large foot, or one large nose, or one large set of ears, etc. A gryphon, something resembling an angel.

The framing device is one where a monk discovers three ancient crumbling books, and scrambles to decipher them as they molder away. These books are the personal accounts of John, his wife Hagia with the face in the body, and a third character raising youngsters. The chapters alternate among the accounts as the narrative proceeds and John overcomes his astonishment to try to find a secure footing in this new world.

As a narrative it's a little disjointed, but you read Valente for the language as much as anything else, and this exotic playground gives her room to indulge in lush metaphors and extravagant descriptions. It's fun to watch her make stuff up on the fly, as it seems.

[ambyr · Rating 2 out of 5]

This felt awkwardly bloated to me; enough for a novella, not for a trilogy.

[Gini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Catherynne Valente's lyrical prose and masterful comprehension of world mythologies come together to create a book so achingly beautiful that I didn't want to reach the end.

The fable of Prester John really was the first fake viral meme to infect the world. But unlike today's "Good Times Virus" warnings, Prester John's tale arrived in the form of a letter to the ruler of Constantinople in the 12th Century. No one has ever determined who wrote the letter, in which "John" boasted that he was both a priest and a king in a world inhabited by gryphons, unicorns, dragons and other fabulous creatures.

No one knew who he was, but everyone believed the letter. Expeditions set out in search of this mythical kingdom, and the letter influenced political policy for about 500 years.

In real life, eventually enough of the world was explored for the letter's veracity to come into doubt and its influence to fade away. In Valente's novel, though, all of it is true. Beautifully, delightfully true.

The Habitation of the Blessed is the first volume in a trinity of books called A Dirge for Prester John, and as such it is the origin story and the reader's introduction to the world. The tale is told from three points of view, each from a different time in the history of this magical kingdom: John's, his wife's, and Imthital's who is the nursemaid to the royal children. The voices and viewpoints of the three tales are distinct and well-defined, drawing out the charactbuter of the teller as much as conveying the events of the plot.

This is, by necessity, a story that draws from Biblical sources as well: Prester John is, after all, a priest. Here again, Valente's thorough grounding in all mythologies supplies resonance as she deftly turns the familiar on its head and blends it with the fantastic. The end result is far from conventional.

I anxiously await the next book in the series.

[MJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Cat Valente book I've ever read has been somewhat overwhelming--she constructs narratives and narrators that come alive and pierce you with their words until your soul is bleeding. This book is no exception; The Habitation of the Blessed is a work of art, and reading it was both agony and ecstasy.

Valente blends myth and history and faith together to tell the "real" story of Prester John, his journey beyond the end of the world, and what he found there. The book begins with a missionary named Hiob, who stumbles across the threshold of Prester John's kingdom and an extraordinary tree bearing books instead of oranges. He is permitted by its keeper to pick three books, and he chooses by chance three converging stories, recorded in the same hand by the same extraordinary woman.

As he begins to copy these tales to send back home, Hiob (and the reader) is forced to take a hard look at his faith and confront some difficult questions. Can God exist in a world where everyone already lives forever? In a world of monsters, what is a man? What is luck, and what is grace, and can you make your own?

On a personal level, this book made me feel A Lot Of Feelings. It's also EVERYTHING I LOVED ABOUT RELIGIOUS STUDIES plus a bunch of mythology and philosophy, which means I felt a little bit as though it was somehow written just for me.

Even if you aren't me, though, I think you'd like The Habitation of the Blessed if you love books that make you close them every now and then to stare into space and think deeply about what you've just read. (It took me weeks to finish for just that reason.)

[Unwisely · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought the premise was fascinating - what if the Prester John letter were real? (I actually picked this up due to her Big Idea post on Scalzi's blog). And it started out pretty promising, with three intertwined stories. It could have done with some sort of glossary, as there were a ton of races of non-existent beasts, and I hadn't heard of some of them before and had trouble keeping them straight.


And then....it got literary, which is to say confusing and nonsensical. The author apparently couldn't think of an ending, so just stopped writing all of the tales. A bunch of the stuff was left bafflingly unexplained, some of the framing stuff was muddied - possibly in a set up for a sequel (it claims to be Volume 1 in A Dirge for Prester John) but it just frustrated me. It was like English class, where we're supposed to Just Know what happens because of who is well-lit or not. Maybe if you enjoyed that sort of crap, this is for you, but it was definitely *not* for me.

Two stars because I actually finished it, but, ugh. Not recommended.

[Hot Mess Sommelière ~ Caro · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't care how lyrically and marvelously written this book is, it was a drag and a bore and it was horrible.

I feel like those rave reviews run along the same vein as the rave reviews for some inexplicably admired classic work which you must read in school and teachers praise for its incredible features that were never before seen when in reality, the emperor is quite naked and no one dares admit this novel was simply NO FUN AT ALL.
First of all, the story of this book, which in itself COULD have been good was soon interrupted by pointless and redundant side stories that felt to inspire anything but sleepiness in me. In fact, this book helped me go to sleep every night, which I applaud because I often struggle with falling asleep.

Hiob, together with John and the complete rest of the cast made it on my worst character list because I was never so bored by an entire ensemble in a story before. At least there's one thing this book accomplished!

Hiob is a priest who speaks languages and trabels around, so you'd think he would be open minded but of course we must not forget, he IS a priest. Apparently, it's every priests' holy duty to be dull. Anything else would surely be sinful or at least that's what the novel communicatdd to me. Hiob and John both are constantly affronted by the weird cultures they encounter, and while these cultures might have been interestig seen through an interesting character's eyes, Hiob and John just destroyed everything. Also, Hagia (not sure that's how her name is spelled) was a complete weirdo. An emotional blank space, I just couldn't connect to this uninspired alien creature.

I couldn't get into the story at all. I tried to start this book three times, and every time I gave up after 3 hours or so and started again. After a while, I just gave up for good and listened to the audiobook only at night, which normally keeps me awake and alert but in this case I just fell asleep as soon as the first few paragraphs were read.

What an incongruous mumble jumble! Like Alice in Wonderland without the wonder and without the charme. Ugh. Valente sometimes seems to believe that people are interested in reading long winded tales told in a lyrical format and don't really need characters that are more than placeholders to share the authors witty command of words, and maybe some people are but I' most certainly not.
I want interesting characters and a story that doesn't make me want to crawl into bed and sleep. Listening to this was more laborous than homework and much less enjoyable. I bought the first two books together but I am seriously considering just passing on book 2.

I recommend the audiobook as a replacement for sleeping pills. The narrator of this dull tale has a smooth, soothing tone and since nothing urgent ever happens, none of the passages will interest you enough to take you away from slumberland.

1 star for this pathetic journey through thesaurus-land. For an author with such talent, this was shockingly inadequate.

[Bobby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherynne M. Valente has made a Deal.

You know the kind I mean. Maybe it was with the Devil, maybe with God, maybe some Faerie Prince or a Jinn or some other Trickster. The deal was for Imagination and the only way she can pay is to spill it out on the page. Sometimes it spills nicely, even, beautiful. And sometimes it is thrown like a mad artist, wild, really-freaking-weird, gorgeous and ugly and wholly its own. Whichever benefactor she has, they are merciless in their demands for More Story. Thank God for them.

The Habitation of the Blessed is the latter kind of book. It is bonkers. It’s experimental. It’s really, really weird. It’s poignant, it’s gorgeous, it’s filled with the grotesque and more heretics than you can shake a stick at, and lots and lots of love. It’s a glimpse into Eden, a view from The Tower, a meditation on what constitutes a soul. It’s a million metaphors for the ways those souls ought to be used. It’s myth, and legend, and faerie-tale. It’s damn good storytelling. It’s super pansexual.

It rules.

But I’m going to prepare you for the way this book is structured, because I think it’ll help you on your journey.

This is the story of Prester John. Also the story of his wife. Also the story of the people of his land. Also the story of the origin of the land, or at least an origin. It’s a story about storytellers telling stories. Story is Religion, or at the very least Numinous.

(The following may seem like spoilers but I promise it is all laid out in the beginning of the novel.)

The frame story revolves around a priest named Hiob, who is on a quest for the legendary kingdom of Prester John in 1699. The only existing evidence of said kingdom is a letter from Prester John to Constantinople in 1165. On his journey Hiob discovers three organic books from a literal tree of books. One – called The Book in the Quince – details the beginning of Prester John’s journey into the land that would become his kingdom and his search for the Tomb of Saint Thomas. Another is told from Hagia’s perspective about her experiences with John when he arrived, but also something like the Fountain of Youth. And the last is a book called The Scarlet Nursery, which is essentially a book of short stories about the old days of John’s Kingdom, all told by Imtithal to three royal children. Each of Hiob’s books intertwine in subtly byzantine fashion.

Now if you can get past the fact that a major character has no head, you’re good. (Prester John has trouble with it, too.)

Two more quick notes:
1) Ralph Lister reads this on Audible and he is phenomenal.
2) This is a novel to be savored, not devoured. It is cake. Fine wine. It is really good. Don't take in too much and make your brain explode.

Highly Recommended – 9/10

The Folded World is going on the TBR List.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. A beautiful mythos, interesting and compelling narrative. The book is filled with wonder and joy. Through the lyric prose, Valente shares with the reader her obvious love of language, philosophy, history, theology, and mythology. Intertwined stories of Pentexore, a land of creativity, humor, love, sensuality, and immortality, contrast with an ascetic mindset. It's challenging and layered, and writing this review freshly after reading it is difficult because I want to give the book its due but I'm still in awe and joy at what I just read.

Some people will probably dislike this story intensely. It's not for people with little patience for poetic, lyric language, or for those who don't enjoy trippy, dream-sequence style creativity. If you like direct, to the point, straightforward plots, be warned. This book meanders and dallies and teases the reader, playfully inviting you to suspend your disbelief to an extreme. It's not for skimming, either; even though it's a short read, it's not a quick one because your whole attention needs to be focused to truly get the most out of this book.

The story and references will make much more sense to someone familiar with Christianity. I did a fair amount of research on the creatures in the book as I read, but I think anyone could roll with the descriptions in the story and be fine without that. Valente does a fine job of filling in those details you don't understand, but it does help to have some of that knowledge, and might serve to frustrate those who don't want to wait.

I enjoyed it so much. I can't wait to read more.

[Ryandake · Rating 3 out of 5]

well now here's a toughie.

this book is about a priest's search for Prester John, whom Wikipedia tells me is a figure of legend. in legend, he was king of an eden-like country reputed to be in asia, somewhere in the himalaya. the story of Prester John is wrapped up in the Crusades and in all sorts of Christian theology.

this book is about finding Prester John, sort of. and the book is amazingly well-written, a really lovely tale full of great imagination and beauty. it's not a fast read--even i (who usually devours books whole) found myself slowing down to enjoy Valente's lovely sentences and evident compassion. the plotting is well-done, the characters beautifully drawn and vivid, and the depth of the book's humanity is rare and compelling.

but.

the book leans heavily into Christian dogma. the main conflicts in the book are between the theology of Prester John and the beliefs and practices of the residents of this "eden." speaking as an atheist, Christian dogma holds zero interest for me. the arguments on the existence of God or the origin of the universe or the correct moral practice that arises from Christianity is a big ho-hum for me.

i think this book would be a ripper read for someone who is uncertain about the Christian god or who believes in same. for those of other faiths or of no faith, it's missing a leg.

this is supposed to be book one of a trilogy, and i do hope that once Valente is done with the trilogy, she will turn her pen to other subjects. i adore her writing. but her subject matter leaves me unmoved.

[Ergative Absolutive · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an outstanding exploration of the Prester John myth. I think Valente did the world-building exquisitely--flavors of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in it, especially in the road to the Fountain and the mist city where they talk to Knyz--and properly expands the hinted wonders of that world in such a glorious, magical way. The frame narrative, with its rotting books leaving holes in the primary stories, also worked beautifully to accustom me to the idea that the whole of the Prester John story is unknowable. I'm not entirely sure I want to read the second one, because what I know now has very clear bones: John becomes the king of Pentexore, tries to remake it into the Christian paradise that the letter to the West made it out to be, and somehow that brings disaster--or at least decline. I wonder whether the woman who tends the book trees, who rubs uneasily at her neck, is in fact Hagia, who has somehow grown a new head. She very well could be--that would be a wonderful resonance with poor Imtithal who wants nothing more than to take on a new name and be loved (or known) for who she is as Hajji, rather than who she was as Imtithal the story-teller. But in a way I don't care: The whole point of the book is that there are these glorious tales about this glorious world, and now it's gone because a fucking Christian missionary stumbled in and ruined everything, and I don't really want to see how that happens in the second book. I'd rather leave that part in the lacunae of the story.

[Adrienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review also available on my blog The Shameful Narcissist Speaks.

They think you childish, that you insist your god looks just like you.  That is how a baby thinks, because she has only her parents to protect her, so all the power in the universe bears her own face.

Catherynne M. Valente is mostly a hit with me, and though I've had issues getting into a few of her novels before, I was determined to give The Habitation of the Blessed another try.  Not only did I love the language and mytho-religious basis of it, but the following book The Folded World seemed even more intriguing.  Of course there's no rule that says you must read all the books in a series; I just don't like entering a narrative in the middle unless, of course, it's in media res.  The second attempt was more fruitful, and my inabilities prior might have been due to my own concentration issues.  The beginning is a bit slow, but it doesn't last for long.

The Habitation of the Blessed exists as a series of vignettes tied together and hinged on a butterfly's wings.  Using the framing device of Brother Hiob searching for Prester John who went abroad to teach Christianity, but found himself the recipient of an immortal faith.  This style of story within story is very similar to Valente's other series The Orphan's Tales, which starts with In the Night Garden, though Habitation doesn't go quite as Inception as the fore mentioned.  It also involves multiple story tellers as opposed to just one.

The books Hiob harvests from the tree tell the story of John who himself was searching for St. Thomas the apostle, also known as Thomas Didymus, or Thomas the Twin whose "surname" means "twin" in Greek.  The name Thomas itself has its etymology based in the word "twin," so Biblical canon and Habitation calling him Thomas Didymus could be taken to mean "twin twin," as if confirming in replication.¹

Hiob is essentially only the framing device for John's story, but Valente still manages to make him a character of his own with an arc to fulfill in "devouring" the "fruit" of the tree before it rots.  Indeed there is a time limit to the tale of Prester John that we are reminded of at intervals as Hiob struggles to absorb all the knowledge before it is lost forever.

John comes as a stranger in a strange land to Pentexore, a place outside of Christendom, where he initially attempts to proselytize, but soon finds the odder, older, and wiser inhabitants see his religion and god as fanciful stories, but certainly not gospel truth.  It is John who is changed as opposed to these ancient folk, though it doesn't happen overnight.  We are gifted with knowing the future before the priest, so while his disgust of Hagia, the blemmye, initially rankles, the blurb itself names her his wife, and there's even foreshadowing in his encounter with a war (and afterwards orgy) between pygmies and cranes that John has found ways of overcoming his revulsion before.  Prior to this experience, his mindset was "like goes with like," but the pygmies and the cranes have always lived this way, so to them there is no perversion or debauchery.

The blemmyae are headless humanoids who carry their faces on their chests, and because of this they have...fucking...EYE NIPPLES.

*image not found due to author's unwillingness to google it*

Of course the image of Jenova from Final Fantasy VII is all I can think of, but Hagia isn't a parasitic alien though you wouldn't know it from how John initially treats her.  She is wiser than him, as are all of the inhabitants of this place, and the realities of their lives eventually prove to him how absurd his attempts at converting them are.  Hagia's interpretation of the Eve myth, for example, stands in opposition to how it's typically taken.  You would grow tired of Paradise and eternity if nothing ever changes, and even that paradigm is accounted for in the habitation of the blessed.  Every certain amount of years, they hold what is known as the "abir," where lots are chosen and lives are exchanged.  Afterwards, those you once knew, even relatives, are strangers, and you abide by the lottery's decision even if it means leaving spouses behind for new.

Immortality carries its own burdens, which is explored in John's journey and another vignette concerning Imtithal, the "butterfly" nursemaid to three royal children who must be made to understand the only way for either of them to inherit the throne is through regicide.  Immortality means stagnation.  Death makes the wheel turn.

This novel was far deeper than I could've ever imagined, and in more ways than one, was a religious journey.  Directly, it was one for Prester John with results he never expected, and by extension, it was one for Brother Hiob absorbing the priest's story.  Even Hiob's search is passed on to his assistant Alaric, and in the way of whisper down the lane, the latter believes the "strange creatures" John describes were metaphors and allegories for virtues and/or sins. In the initial steps of his journey to the immortal fountain, John saw what he viewed as Christian signs: a fallen tower he likened to Babel and Qaspiel, one of his travel companions, who resembled an angel.  It presents the question of whether or not these Biblical stories came out of Pentaxore, and that's why they exist in the world of the novel in the first place, where Pentexore is the true basis of Heaven since whoever drinks from the fountain three times will never die.

Valente turns the idea of a proselytizing priest on its head with the so-called being absorbed into a culture that far predates and overrides his beliefs.  This is a momentous metamorphosis of someone known as a legendary Christian patriarch and king, as well as a potential critique of patriarchy itself, though I'm sure proponents of that system could accuse Hagia of the same crimes as Eve in bringing sin and not knowledge to an ignorant man.

"Prester" comes from "presbyter," which means "elder" and is the origin of the English word "priest" (it's also obviously the root of the sect name "Presbyterian).  Prester John is said to have ruled over a Nestorian (Church of the East) Christian nation lost amid Muslims and pagans of the "Orient" in which the Patriarch of the St. Thomas Church resided, so that's another way John and Thomas connect.  The accounts of the priest's adventures are varied collections of medieval, popular fantasy (of which I'd never heard of until reading this and doing my brief research) depicting him as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures, which is clearly where Valente pulled her tale.¹

The search for Prester John is a medieval legend that viewed him as a beacon of hope for the struggle between Christian Europe and the Islamic world.  His creation is like an atomic bomb of propaganda that Europe hoped would help them in the Crusades.  This bit of information makes me like Valente's novel even more, as she has the patriarch assimilate into an opposing, "other" culture instead of the normal European method of conquering, colonizing, and converting.  Because Prester John was never found, it went from his kingdom being in Asia to Africa in the frantic hope he existed in some remote corner of the globe.  Merely the belief in him apparently had a profound affect on European exploration and discovery of Asia and Africa...much to those continents' rue. ²

The St. Thomas Christians are also called Syrian Christians of India, so the tying thread is John and Thomas proselytizing in the east where the story's "stranger in a strange land" motif has its base.  Instead of finding humans who hadn't heard the "Word," Thomas and John find creatures with their own culture, tradition, and beliefs, and instead of the indigenous population being converted (or, let's be honest here when it comes to this, forced to convert), the wannabe missionaries are changed.

Habitation is a rebuttal of the idea of spreading Christianity across the globe and a treatise of respecting the faith of where you find yourself instead of condemning them and attempting to alter people who have no desire for it, no matter how strange, foreign, or "disgusting" you might (initially) view them.

There is a bit of ending fatigue with the novel, and I'd pass if you're not a fan of eloquent/flowery language (aka purple prose).  I loved the lush, beautiful descriptions almost mad in their eloquence.  The novel is more of a collection of parables and fables as opposed to action oriented, which is very signature Valente, and also seen in her Orphan's Tales series.  Her focus on story telling is divine and it resonates through every carefully chosen word.

4.5 stars

References:

1. Wikipedia: Prester John
2. History Today: The Search for Prester John

[Karissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a number of Valente's books and absolutely adored them. Like her previous books this book was beautifully written with excellent imagery. The book is told from four viewpoints and was a bit harder for me to read than previous books. As such, it was probably my least favorite book of hers to date, that being said it was still incredibly creative and beautifully written.

Brother Hiob of Luzerne stumbles upon a tree that sprouts books instead of fruit while working at a missionary in the Himalayans. He is allowed to pluck three books from the tree. The first is written by Prester John himself and tells of Prester's journey into magical lands. The second is written by Prester's wife Hagia; an immortal who carries her face on her chest and has no head. The third is a collection of nursery tales by a being named Imtithal who was a nanny.

This book has a lot of what I have come to love from Valente; crazily creative creatures and descriptions that come alive to the reader, beautiful writing that is incredibly rich and weaves wonderfully magical pictures, and tons of mythological references. The story alternates between Brother Hiob, Prester John, Hagia, and Imtithal. As such it progresses slowly and has more of a plodding mythological and somewhat religious tone to it than previous works.

I enjoyed hearing from Brother Hiob who had to alternate his reading because each of the books he pulled off of the tree started rotting as soon as he plucked them off. As such he becomes obsessed with reading these stories before they rot. I also enjoyed Prester John's viewpoint as he stumbles into a magical and wonderful land after crossing a sea of sand. Although Prester John's very catholic religious viewpoints are a bit tiresome at times, it is interesting to see how this new land reacts to his very orthodox viewpoint.

I also enjoyed Hagia's viewpoint. She is immortal and is a blemmye (has no head, but her face is on her torso). She falls in love with Prester John. Although most of her accounts are about her various lives and loves and it is isn't until later in the book she meets with Prester John.

I did not enjoy the sections by Imtithal as much. Imtithal has three children she takes care of and is a being with huge ears that can enfold her whole body. You don't really know how she is related to Prester John until much later in the story. Imtithal tells a number of creation myths to her young charges. I had trouble connecting these with the other parts of the story and constantly had to work on focusing on the stories because my mind would start to wander. I just couldn't relate to the stories or relate them to the overall book.

This book is a slow read. The writing is incredibly beautiful and well done, but you need to take time to read it and really pay attention to understand what is going on. There is a lot of ambiguity here. The constantly switching viewpoints makes the story progress slowly and presents more of a puzzle that the reader needs to piece together than a cohesive story. It is masterfully done, but slow to read.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and continue to enjoy Valente's beautiful writing and the absolutely crazy and wacky creatures and worlds that she weaves. This book was a slow read and one you really need to pay attention to and think about while you read. I wasn't crazy about the changing viewpoints and the way you had to piece the story together. I also had some trouble relating Imtithal's sections to the rest of the story. If you are a fan of mythology and beautiful writing and don't mind some ambiguity I can definitely recommend this to you. I didn't find it to be quite as magical and wonderful as previous books I have read by Valente, but it was still very well done.

[Danielle Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another really solid effort from Valente - I'm really loving her fantasy work. The main story is about a Nestorian (Christian) monk named John, who in the early medieval period goes on a mission of sorts to the East to search for the tomb of Thomas the Apostle. He becomes lost in a land full of mythical creatures, all immortal, and struggles to determine whether he has found the lost Garden of Eden or some circle of hell. The structure of this piece is very interesting. It's three books in one, sections of each interspersed throughout to tell one story, with additional sections written by our narrators, who are reading these books and adding their own thoughts as they go. One book is written by John, one by his wife, and one by a storyteller unrelated to them - this last provides us with some of the foundational myths and histories of the world in which we find ourselves. The narrators/ commentators of all of these are monks from the later medieval period who have found these books and are translating them.

The Habitation of the Blessed is especially interesting to me because it is based off one of our own historical myths, that of Prester John, a Christian king who was said to rule over many lands in the east in the early 12th century, and whose domain included the Fountain of Youth. This myth was a powerful one in medieval Christian circles, and held fast in the minds of Christians up through the 16th and 17th centuries. On top of that, I have a keen interest in Christian hagiographies (lives of saints) and the issues of authenticity inherent in them - who's writing this story, what's their motivation, what's being told and what's being left out, etc. These issues are masterfully explored in Habitation, and I think the book will be theoretically interesting to other religious studies scholars interested in the authenticity/fraud dynamic.

I should note that, to be fair, I found the beginning of this book a bit slow, and I think characterization is a little weak (honestly, characterization seems to be Valente's Achilles' heal all around). This is in large part because of the size of the project she's undertaken - she's introducing a new, deep, rich world and all the races in cultures within in, requiring a large number of characters who must live, somehow, within a scant 300 pages. As always, though, Valente's strength is her creation of the myth, and that's very present here. I'm very much looking forward to reading the next in the series.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few years ago, reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition, I was surprised to learn that Thomas Jefferson believed the Corps of Discovery would find, among other things in the then-unknown western reaches of America, a race of headless people with faces on their chests. I now know, thanks to Catherynne Valente's The Habitation of the Blessed, that this (along with the Fountain of Youth and other marvels) was part of the Prester John myth, transplanted whole from 13th century Europe to 18th century America.

The Habitation of the Blessed is a fantasy based on the Prester John myth. Told by a 17th century monk in a series of letters sent back to his monastery in Switzerland, quoting extensively from texts found growing on a magical tree, it is the tale of the kingdom of Prester John, as inaccessible or lost as Atlantis. Populated by people with faces on their chests, people with giant hands or ears, pygmies who mate with human-sized cranes, people with the heads of swans (descendents of Leda), and talking tigers and lions, is it a remarkable place -- I would say a fabulous place, but I don't think most people use the word fabulous in its old sense, a place where fables are true. In this land, people drink from the literal Fountain of Youth and stay 30 years old forever. In this land, sand and rock flow like water. In this land, people switch roles, husbands, wives, and children every three centuries, just to stir things up.

And so on. Pure fantasy rather leaves me cold, so I was not terribly interested in sticking around to see what happened ... by the book's halfway point I didn't sense any sort of human crisis in the making, or even much of a story, nothing to really hold my interest beyond the retelling of essentially meaningless fables. But the real problem for me was Catherynne Valente's characters, who all think and talk the same. Valente's fantasy fable reminds me of a medieval bestiary, where elephants, lions, and griffons look like horses or dogs because those were the only animals the artist had actually ever seen. Same thing here: the monk, Prester John, his wife, the long-eared sprite who raises a queen's giant-handed children ... they all sound alike.

Catherynne Valente has a great idea, and I loved learning more about the Prester John legend and the strength of its hold the human mind from the times of the Crusades right up to modern times, but the story needs a teller who can make it live.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, I've just finished reading this one (for the second time, mind you) and since the sequel is crying out for me to start reading THAT, I figure I should at least put something down for the first one.

As usual, Valente has created a gorgeous, intricate, beautiful MESS of a world that's wonderfully easy to fall into. It's also a lot of WORK, this one. You have characters who's ears wrap around their bodies, characters who's hands are HUGE (just their hands, not the rest of their bodies), a character who's mouth is a huge caludron that he can boil things in, and oh yes, one of the three main narrators doesn't have a head. Trying to keep all of this in mind when people are having a causal conversation is pretty tough, but worth it.

It's not a happy book, although it has some happy sections. It's telegraphed from the very beginning, heck, from the very TITLE, that things aren't going to end well, everything's going to be lost, AND that it's going to be the title character's fault. That may be the only reason I didn't give this a fifth star: I didn't LIKE Prestor John. He's so sanctimonious and earnest, he's found what amounts to heaven, but it isn't the right KIND of heaven, so now he's trying to change it all to fit his ideas of what heaven SHOULD be. He's exactly like the dwarves at the end of C.S. Lewis's "The Last Battle"; surrounded by paradise and yet convinced that they're stuck in a filthy barn for all of eternity, congradulating themselves on "not being taken in".

This sounds like a negative review, but "Habitation of the Blessed" is up there with my favorite Valente books. Never boring, never expected, and with lots of fun parts to at least balance out a little of the impending tragedy. John getting verbally shredded by a lamia in front of the entire town is not to be missed. I like Griselba, and I hope we see more of her in the second book. She's got sass.

[Clay Kallam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Catherynne M. Valente has written some interesting (if nothing else) books, and I’ve stuck with her through some strange digressions, but with “The Habitation of the Blessed” (Night Shade, $14.99, 272 pages), she’s lost me.

“The Habitation of the Blessed” is billed as volume one in A Dirge for Prester John, and it’s a sometimes grotesque, always unsettling novel set in a fantasy land where all the weird variations on humanity that ancient writers could imagine are all too real. For example, one of the three narrators is a blemmyae, which is a human being with no head, but eyes on her breasts and a mouth in her stomach. There are people with one eye, eyes all around their heads, huge ears (another narrator), huge hands, and so on.

Valente’s choice of Prester John as the third narrator furthers her thematic, philosophic idea of the word being made flesh, for Prester John was a mythical king of a Central Asian empire. He was also a follower of Nestorius, one of the many early Christian thinkers who wrestled with the notion of how exactly a transcendent God manifested Himself in a particular human body – or, to put it another way, precisely how did the Word of God become human flesh.

Valente beats this conceit to death with her various characters, who are flesh made from words of other humans, and does so in a book with little uplift – it is, after all, part of a dirge – and not much payoff. In short, though I’ve recommended her earlier works, “The Habitation of the Blessed” is where I get off the bus. But if you really loved “Palimpsest” and the two volumes of The Orphan’s Tales,” this one might be worth a shot. But remember, I warned you.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often find Catherynne M. Valente's work difficult to categorize (unless "Can I read it NOW?" counts as a category). I tend to conceptualize books based on what I read them for - fun characters, well-built fantasy world, interesting philosophical science-fiction, entertaining writer, and so on. But Valente doesn't really fit in to any of those mental maps. I mean, her stories are lovely, but tied up in the fact that her stories, as stories, WORK is the way that she weaves words together into a kind of poetry. Her language is almost spellbinding; it does that thing that I always want fantasy to do - catch you up in itself and make everything seem more vivid, more bright, more perfect. (If anyone has ever read Elaine Scarry's "Dreaming by the BooK", Valente does that thing that Scarry talks about where she uses colors and descriptions of light and opacity to make the images appear before your eyes...I think I've just written a review aimed at the audience of myself.)
Anyway, Valente is one of those authors who I can't help but read, but don't know how to recommend. Books with beautiful language! Books with gorgeous mythic imagery! Books that you don't want to put down because you're worried they're not real and might disappear when you're not reading them!
If any of those speak to you, try this book.

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherynne Valente is currently my favorite contemporary writer. I expect a lot from her when I pick up her work: I want to be challenged, and I want to dine very slowly on a feast of luxurious descriptions and strange, beautiful (and sometimes horrifying) imagery. I want something otherworldly, but real. This book filled my expectations, and I savored it very slowly indeed, because she is an author who deserves my full and undivided attention.

Valente is particularly skilled at interlinking labyrinths of interconnected stories, which is what she does in this book. The structure here is nowhere near as complex as in The Orphan's Tales, but it's still a delicate, complicated thing. She distills the myths about Prester John and his kingdom and creates a fantastic world, and she does so while commenting on the nature of religion and faith, presenting ideas about the nature of love and happiness and how they change. I'm eager to read the second part of this story.