Status
Call number
Series
Publication
Description
Two novellas and a full-length novel of Nevèrÿon, the land at the limit of history In The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, a disease has come to Nevèrÿon. Men, rich and poor, have been stricken with it--but far fewer women. More and more die, and no one recovers. The illness seems to have first come from the Bridge of Lost Desire, a hangout for prostitutes male and female, but its spread through the city has been terrifying. And it will change Nevèrÿon forever, both its sexual and its political landscape. Written in 1984, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals is an astute fictionalization of New York City in the first two years of the AIDS crisis. Interwoven with the ancient story are Samuel R. Delany's modern accounts of what went on in the meanest streets of Gotham during that time. This wholly original novel (the first novel about AIDS from a major American publisher) is presented along with two other stories about mummers, prostitutes, and street people in the fantastic land of Nevèrÿon and its capital, port Kolhari--an ancient city that becomes more and more modern with each story. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.… (more)
User reviews
I read and enjoyed the putative body text of
The acme of the book, though, and perhaps of the whole series, was longest piece, "Appendix A: The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, or, Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part Five." This part features a complete Nevèrÿon story centered around an AIDS-like plague and the social responses it provokes. Interleaved with that story are several other registers of writing, including lightly fictionalized anecdotes from Delany's own life, a running account of his gay junky acquaintance "Joey," tail-devouring criticism of the book in hand by the imaginary academic S. L. Kermit, and a closing note about the public health facts of AIDS as they were understood at the time of writing in mid-1984.
In addition to the intended reflections of 1980s New York in Nevèrÿon, Appendix A brings up occasional irruptions of Nevèrÿon in 1980s New York. But my favorite passage of "Plagues and Carnivals" was section 9.6, detailing relations between the Mummer and the Master of the academy. In these seven pages (261-7) Delany tacitly supplies an interpretive frame for the canon of Classical Greek philosophy from Heraclitus through Plato. It's an impressive feat and delightful for the informed reader.
"Clearly the Nevèrÿon series is a model of late twentieth-century (mostly urban) America. The question is, of course: What kind of model is it?" (377) The far shorter Appendix B collapses into the more "factual" and explicatory matter of the author's reflections on the three volumes, answers to readers about the nature of the "modular calculus," citation of sources and inspirations, theory of semiotics/semiology grounding Delany's writing, and a list of Delany's corrections to the three books then in print--when he thought that the work was "complete."