Just as a familiar section of a city can fall into ruin, the characters undergo horrific mutilations and sometimes commit them as well.
The title is not an accident, because the idea of a scroll which is erased and written over translates into the sexually transmitted tattoos which each traveler accumulates with each linkup, as well as the idea of the reality of the city itself being eradicated and rewritten over all time. It's not that kind of book.The four characters, two male and two female, each have motivations to return to Palimpsest and come to an awareness that they need to do this together if they do it at all. I am hazy on what exactly happened, but I have arrived at a state where I don't much care about the facts stated. Fortunately the author is well equipped to provide compelling images draped with sumptuous language to make the whole thing a mostly pleasant experience. There are scenes of what seems like depravity and others straight out of fairy tales frequently alluded to explicitly, and the people who the core four encounter are endowed with their own motivations which you can start to suspect or to trust, and later revise your intuitions about, but it doesn't seem like in the end there is a clear sequence of one thing leading to another and culminating in the outcome we end up with. Instead, the yearnings and fears of the characters are the main force behind what happens. It is confusing at first for the listener to know that the character you have just been introduced to in one setting has just gone to a completely different one with different kinds of logic governing how things work and how people think, and more than enough work to try to keep them straight without being burdened with a strong plot driving what is happening. This is a story which takes place in two worlds, our own and in the dream world of the city-state Palimpsest, and the four main characters who can travel back and forth do so by means of sex with a fellow traveler.
I used to wonder whether a person could write a novel by writing fabulous scenes full of detail and wonder, and just stringing them together like beads on a string with whatever you would need to make them semi-coherent.
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