* "The dreamy, ancient voice
is not unlike Le Guin's, and this collection should appeal to her
fans as well as to those of literary fantasy and Latin American fiction."
--Library Journal (Starred Review)
[A] "remarkable collaboration
. . . an engossing escape . . . a useful tonic and reminder that the
irascible perspectives of Borges and Cortazar are alive and well."
-- Bridge Magazine
"These tales of an imaginary
empire burst from the mouth of a storyteller whose meditations on
power -- its acquisition, possession and loss -- elude easy paraphrase.
Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of a work by a prominent Argentine
writer elegantly articulates the shifting tones of the larger narrative,
whose theme seems to be the endless imperfectibility of human society."
-- New
York Times Summer Reading
"The history of an imaginary
empire in a series of tales that adopt the voice of a marketplace
storyteller.... While the point of each tale eludes paraphrase, the
cumulative burden is the imperfectibility of human society... Le Guin's
translation, which ranges from blunt to elegant to oracular, seems
like the ideal medium for this grim if inescapable message."
--New
York Times Book Review
"There's a very modern undercurrent
to the Kalpa empire, with tales focusing on power (in a political
sense) rather than generic moral lessons. Her mythology is consistent
-- wide in scope, yet not overwhelming. The myriad names of places
and people can be confusing, almost Tolkeinesque in their linguistic
originality. But the stories constantly move and keep the book from
becoming overwhelming. Gorodischer has a sizeable body of work to
be discovered, with eighteen books yet to reach English readers, and
this is an impressive introduction."
-- Review of Contemporary Fiction
"Gorodischer does an excellent
job of presenting a fully realized empire ... [Kalpa Imperial
is] a book well worth reading."
-- Steven
Silver
"These stories -- like this
empire -- are deceptively simple, as they are built from complex components
of a deep and richly imagined history."
-- Strange
Horizons
"Gorodischer is a fabulist
in the tradition of fellow Latin American Jorge Luis Borges."
-- SF
Site
"Those
looking for offbeat literary fantasy will welcome Kalpa Imperial:
The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Argentinean writer Angélica
Gorodischer. Translated from the Spanish by Ursula Le Guin, this is
the first appearance in English of this prize-winning South American
fantasist."
-- Publishers Weekly
"A
novel that evokes weighty matters lightly and speaks of self-evident
wisdom while itself remaining mysterious."
-- Washington
Post
"Throughout, an oblique and
impish wisdom prevails, the oral storyteller both entertaining and
instructing the crowds with diverting truths and truthful diversions.
"Kalpa Imperial is a speculative fiction of a high order,
a work to savor, reread, and reinterpret."
--Nick Gevers, Locus
"The only thing more amazing
than the stories about this nonexistent empire is the fact that it
has taken them so long -- twenty years -- to appear in English."
-- Scifidimensions
"It's always difficult to
wrap up a rave review without babbling redundant praises. This time
I'll simply say "Buy this Book!"
-- Faren Miller, Locus
"The elaborate history of
an imaginary country...is Nabokovian in its accretion of strange and
rich detail, making the story seem at once scientific and dreamlike."
-- Time Out New York
"At their very best, then,
the stories of Kalpa Imperial have power and beauty and a kind
of inevitability, so that their plots unfold in ways that should be
surprising but aren't, or that are very surprising and shouldn't be.
"
-- Internet
Review of Science Fiction
Angélica Gorodischer, both
from without and within the novel, accomplishes the indispensable
function Salman Rushdie says the storyteller must have: not to let
the old tales die out; to constantly renew them. And she well knows,
as does that one who met the Great Empress, that storytellers are
nothing more and nothing less than free men and women. And even though
their freedom might be dangerous, they have to get the total attention
of their listeners and, therefore, put the proper value on the art
of storytelling, an art that usually gets in the way of those who
foster a forceful oblivion and prevent the winds of change.
-- Carmen Perilli, La Gaceta, Tucuman
At a time when books are conceived
and published to be read quickly, with divided attention in the din
of the subway or the car, this novel is to be tasted with relish,
in peace, in moderation, chewing slowly each and every one of the
stories that make it up, and digesting it equally slowly so as to
properly assimilate it all.
-- Rodolfo Martinez
A vast, cyclical filigree . .
. Gorodischer reaches much farther than the common run of stories
about huge empires, maybe because she wasn't interested in them to
begin with, and enters the realm of fable, legend, and allegory.
--Luis G. Prado, Gigamesh, Barcelona
