Mr. Ceridwen once had a very large public tizzy about how irritating this book was to him, I'm sure made all the more irritating because I had also just publicly declared my enduring love for Mr. Miéville. That was probably like a dozen years ago, which is apparently how long it takes me to get over...
This book... oh dear. It's quite good and it's very hard to explain. What starts off seeming like a noir-ish crime novel or police procedural opens up and allows the reader to sort of play with what's happening in the reality of the story. Two city-states, somewhere in Europe, live within each other...
The City & the City is essentially a police procedural in a strange and interesting setting. The book opens up with our main character, Inspector Tyador Borlú, arriving onto the scene where a dead woman has been found. The story follows him as he attempts to solve the mystery. The setting intri...
A murder mystery set in two cities that share the same geographic space. Beszel and Ul Qoma are two Balkan city states that just happen to be shuffled together like a deck of cards. This is not like East and West Berlin separated by a wall, or like Jerusalem with its various sectors. One house might...
6/25/2016 - Reread for UC Book Club June 2016 selection.For me the brilliance of this book isn't the plot or the characters, many of whom are types and trophes. It is the idea of two cities in the same place, because it is in many ways so true. Most cities have at least two faces. In this book, the ...
The setting of this book is the star of The City & The City by China Miéville. Two cities appear to occupy the same physical space but are very separate in language, culture, and politics. Between them lies a border - a real, imagined, or perceived boundary that both sides work diligently to maintai...
The City and the City is still not as good as Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, but it's a heck of a lot better than Kraken. It's a noir murder mystery set in the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which, although they inhabit for the most part the same physical space, remain defiantly separate, the inhabi...
This story is set in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are fictional but co-located somewhere in the Eastern European/Turkish area our own world. The two cities basically occupy the same physical spaces, but the residents of each city are not supposed to acknowledge or interact with the other ...
At the beginning of the book Mieville thanks Kafka and Chandler and that is entirely apropos. How you feel about The City & The City will depend on how you feel about that mixture. The basic premise is that there are two separate that lie alongside each other. The two cities are separate places t...
Becca (my niece who keeps hoping I can become more literate than the average science nerd) made me read this. Occasionally, I suppose, she thinks it would be good to drag me away from so much 19th-century stuff. Fortunately, I could borrow this book from my library in kindle format. So, to make my n...
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