★★★★☆ Be vicious, be loved, and be lucky

The City in Glass

Nghi Vo

Nghi Vo's The City in Glass, which she describes as "my pandemic book, the thing I wrote while cooped up in my apartment with only my cat for company, and ... just about the hardest thing I’ve ever written." is the story of an angel, a demon, and a city. The demon is Vitrine and the city, Azril, is her city, the city she made. We never learn the angel's name.

Vo is a writer whose work I love, almost despite myself. She is very self-aware as a writer. Gotta tell the truth -- usually that annoys me. Writers who seem consciously to be trying to produce capital-L Literature strike me as pretentious. But I can't argue with Vo's results. She is the most versatile producer of varied and creatively told stories I can think of. And her language!

Vitrine ... heard the sound of crying below. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing for someone to cry through Summersend, but giving the cat one last scratch, Vitrine wound her way like smoke into the house underneath her.
It was a heartbreak, and Vitrine examined the sharp edges of the fight, the hard words that lay strewn on the girl’s floor like shards of glass, the way her tears tasted of hurt and of fury and perhaps just a little of relief.
“You are all made quite badly,” Vitrine complained to the girl who lay face-down in her bed. “If you were like us, you would never bother with hearts that broke or took on poison like this.”

These paragraphs occur on the second page of the book, when we have barely met Vitrine. I read them and felt that I knew Vitrine -- who she is, and how she thinks.

The City in Glass is barely a story, in the sense of having a beginning, a middle and an end, as Aristotle said a story ought to. It feels like the sort of thing someone might write when cooped up with a cat during a plague. Although it is slow at times, Vo does manage eventually to arrive somewhere.

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