“I really didn't appreciate The Scar or Perdido Street Station, though I read both of them and understood their literary significance. After reading the review for Kraken and The City & The City, I decided he had kind of changed his writing and was perhaps taking less liberty with language and was writing a little more conservatively (which was really what I needed to appreciate his writing).
This is interesting, as this book is entirely about language itself. That being said, it's written rather conservatively, compared to the other two works I mention, with little in the way of archaic or baroque vocabulary. The vocabulary, while extensive, isn't at, say, the level of Umberto Eco, and I didn't find myself in need of a dictionary, and rarely as a verb conjugated to an extend that made me frown. No, the book is largely very available to the reader, and written very well and in fact in 340-ish pages, which is much shorter than some of his other works as well.
The other thing I'd add to this -- I did rate it five stars, which I am less and less likely to do these days -- is that the speech at the end of the book is one of the best I've ever read. Unfortunately, it can't simply be taken out of context; one must in fact have read the rest of the book to understand it, but it's worth the price of admission alone.
The book is tremendous, and while I was worried I'd regret it when I picked it up, I'm quite pleased I did.”
avriette wrote this review Sunday, August 21, 2011.
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