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The City of Dreaming Books, by Walter Moers (translated from German by John Brownjohn), is an adventure story about an aspiring writer. It's not about writing, except sideways: early in the story, the narrator, Optimus Yarnspinner, talks about how trite it is to write about the difficulty of writing.
Yarnspinner sets out to Bookholm with an anonymous manuscript, hoping to find the person who wrote it. We get a fine description of that city of books, and the many and varied bookstores within it, both their contents and the architecture. The city is also full of writers, and many readings, often by professional readers-aloud (a skill akin to acting). He is warned that he is in danger, and then stumbles into a series of adventures, exploring a vast system of caves, full of monsters of many sorts, some of whom give Yarnspinner information, or help him, or seem to at first. I think my favorite of the invented species are the Booklings, cyclopean beings who dedicate themselves to a published author and attempt to memorize all of his/her works. There are bits, here and elsewhere in the book, that make direct reference to real writers, either quoting well-known works or playing with their names; this is mixed in with invented writers, books, and even genres. The Booklings may have been suggested by Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but the tone is very different: Yarnspinner refers to rare and/or no-longer-extant books, but they aren't what the Booklings are interested in.
Moers describes a world in which a dangerous book is as likely to try to bite a person as to give them nightmares or dangerous ideas.
He has written an odd book and a good one, though I don't think it passes the Bechdel test. (Many of the characters seem to be masculine because that's the author's default gender when not otherwise specified--not human, and no interactions where gender seems to matter—but there are also a bunch where this reinforces the male-as-active/adventurer/person who makes moral choices.)
The review that led me to read this had me expecting something more metafictional: the author periodically addresses the reader, but we're always clearly the readers, not characters in the story. In terms of genre, this is more fantasy than either science fiction or, I think, magical realism. The book has fine illustrations, which I think are by the author (they're not otherwise credited, and the jacket says he is a cartoonist as well as a writer).
Yarnspinner sets out to Bookholm with an anonymous manuscript, hoping to find the person who wrote it. We get a fine description of that city of books, and the many and varied bookstores within it, both their contents and the architecture. The city is also full of writers, and many readings, often by professional readers-aloud (a skill akin to acting). He is warned that he is in danger, and then stumbles into a series of adventures, exploring a vast system of caves, full of monsters of many sorts, some of whom give Yarnspinner information, or help him, or seem to at first. I think my favorite of the invented species are the Booklings, cyclopean beings who dedicate themselves to a published author and attempt to memorize all of his/her works. There are bits, here and elsewhere in the book, that make direct reference to real writers, either quoting well-known works or playing with their names; this is mixed in with invented writers, books, and even genres. The Booklings may have been suggested by Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but the tone is very different: Yarnspinner refers to rare and/or no-longer-extant books, but they aren't what the Booklings are interested in.
Moers describes a world in which a dangerous book is as likely to try to bite a person as to give them nightmares or dangerous ideas.
He has written an odd book and a good one, though I don't think it passes the Bechdel test. (Many of the characters seem to be masculine because that's the author's default gender when not otherwise specified--not human, and no interactions where gender seems to matter—but there are also a bunch where this reinforces the male-as-active/adventurer/person who makes moral choices.)
The review that led me to read this had me expecting something more metafictional: the author periodically addresses the reader, but we're always clearly the readers, not characters in the story. In terms of genre, this is more fantasy than either science fiction or, I think, magical realism. The book has fine illustrations, which I think are by the author (they're not otherwise credited, and the jacket says he is a cartoonist as well as a writer).
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