Hello, after reading your posts, I'm going to read this book. Is this book part of a trilogy?
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Hello
Gormenghast is the most psychedelic book I've ever read. It's like reading a painting. It's like reading a hallucination. It's like reading a deep mossy breath and falcons soaring.
You have to be in the mood and read it slow and visualize every single image. Mesmerizing.
It isn’t for everyone. If you arnt enjoying the prose then the story will give you very little else to work with. Find something else and watch the mini series with Christopher lee, Jonathan Rhys-meyers and Steven fry.
Personally, it's in my fantasy top five, but it definitely isn't for everybody. Especially the first book, I reread it periodically for the atmosphere and the descriptions rather than the plot, because although there is one it meanders and takes weird side passages, much like the castle itself. It's a story about a place rather than about the people who live in it, in the same vein as, say, Perdido Street Station.
It's that well written. But it's definitely more literary than most fantasy and hardly qualifies as fantasy at all.
In another thread we're talking about how the number of today's fantasy books that will be remembered in 100 years is vanishingly small. And yet here we are talking about Gormenghast 70 years after it was published - and people will still be talking about it 30 years from now.
Is Gormenghast really that good?
All I ever see or hear is how amazing it is, but to be honest I'm struggling with it. I'm a pretty quick reader, bit it's taken me over a week to get to 160 pages. It seems rather repetitive in the castle descriptions, and despite how wonderfully lynchian (though I am aware peake came first) the characters seem rather flat to me.
Am I being overly harsh? Were my expectations too high? Is it worth persevering?