Wednesday, 19 July 2017

Memories of Ice

Nearly a week after having finished 'Memories of Ice' the 3rd book of the 10 part Malazan books by Steven Erikson, I still have difficulty marshalling my thoughts to tell exactly what the book was about.
It was awe-inspiring in the most astronomical sense of the word.
To say that it was ice, with shards of sharp razor like chill edged with searingly painful and apathetically violent moments would be a tad bit tepid way of putting things.
A most complete macrocosm that is actually a journey that one must undertake, sentence after sentence that unfolds into most unthinkable most staggeringly extravagant stain of panoptic blots akin Rorschach test.

Plots inside of plots, sub plots that grip you in a vice, flashbacks of eons past interwoven with present day tapestry, sutured in beautiful grotesque, drawing picturesque realms of such poetic disharmony and chaotic pity that it'd leave your eyes sinking back into your heart to avoid reading anything further to stave off the pain and then back again in their sockets because they've been reined in by invisible threads to each word that flows like liquid ache.

Shocking moments delivered with bulls eye precision that'll have your face contouring like molten wax and realizations throughout the book that might widen your eyes to the point of decreasing hair line.

The writer refuses to hold back onto any emotion putting them on a megaphone of sorts that drain your heart and often fill it with love, longing and lamentations; forcing your head to trace back to all that you remember from 'Deadhouse gates' to realize with a smile and a shiver that all these events are happening simultaneously..the gods' indeed are crazy, bent on wrecking, wracking and full of wrath.
What can I say about the poetic scale of this book? A dismal somberness to each character, elevated with that elegiac backstory told in words so prophetic which only this writer can deliver with an unmitigated swagger that becomes these books.

You'll fall in love, you'll fall in hate and then that humbling moment of tear jerking benevolence when all you'd forgotten of mercy is brought to the forefront and your every emotion of shortsighted malevolence will seem pathetic.

If this is just the third book in the series then what comes next will have to be read with a defibrillator present in the room.


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