Tigana

Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable
Review: Since so many have reviewed Tigana, I won't bother with a typical review. Just know this: in the last few months, when people have asked me to recommend a good book, I've recommended this one. When I finished it, all I could think was, "I can't wait to read everything Kay has ever written." Ironically, it's been several months, and I've only read one other work of his. I'm not starting the next one until Christmas break (I'm a teacher), when I can clear my mind and spend some time with it. Tigana is, in fact, like LOTR; it's a story to savor, to enjoy slowly, even if you typically read books in a day or two. It starts slowly, but it unfolds so beautifully, and it will stay with you for a long, long time. Be patient with it; it's worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Over-rated: Not in Tolkien's League
Review: I can't believe the number of reviews of this book that try to draw comparisons with LotR. Not even close. Don't get me wrong; Kay is a very good writer, but it's ludicrous to draw this particular comparison. Can you imagine incest as a major plot point in Hobbiton?
Other readers have lionized Kay for writing his characters with shades of gray. In this novel, this attempt centered around two characters whose merits I could never accept. I realize that he wanted to keep them "real", but I couldn't buy his attempts to make Brandin "tragically understandable". Nor could I ever justify Dianora's love for him, given her past and his continued reprehensibility.
What I was really looking for was a great fantasy that I could share with my teenage son as we had LotR. This was certainly not it. If what other reviewers write here is true: that this is one of the best fantasies around, maybe I should stop looking.

Rating:
Summary: Trancends its genre
Review: The story of Tigana takes place in the Palm, which is a land of nine city states based loosely on renaissance Italy. When the story begins, the Palm is controlled by two foreign sorcerers. Twenty years before, one of the sorcerers, Brandin, had invaded the Palm to secure a kingdom for his son Stevan. But the prince of Tigana, one of the city-states, killed Stevan in battle. In retaliation, Brandin destroyed the art, architecture, and all other vestiges of Tigana's culture. Worse, he cast a spell that removed all memory of Tigana from everyone other than native Tiganans. Only those born in Tigana can even hear its name.

We see part of the story through the eyes of Devin, a young man whose father left Tigana when Devin was two years old, shortly after the spell was cast. Devin leaves home to sing with a traveling musical company, and soon joins a group of outcasts from Tigana (one of whom has title to the Tiganan throne), whose ultimate aim is the overthrow of Brandin and the restoration of the memory of their homeland.

Part of the story is told through the eyes of Dianora, originally from Tigana, who becomes the concubine of Brandin, with the intention of assassinating him. Dianora becomes more entangled with Brandin than she had intended.

Tigana is good literature written in the fantasy genre. Tigana uses a device of the fantasy genre-a horrendous magic spell that erases all memory of a culture-to explore a struggle for not just freedom, but for memory and identity. The author writes that "Tigana is in good part a novel about memory: the necessity of it, in cultural terms, and the dangers that come when it is too intense." Those looking for swords and sorcery should probably look elsewhere-those looking for character development, originality, and a well paced, well written story in the heroic fantasy genre will find a classic in Tigana.

Rating:
Summary: .
Review: In short, this is an excellent work of fiction. I mention the word fiction specifically in order to clarify the distinction between normal fiction and fantasy, a genre of fiction which I feel tends to be very formulaic and predictable. Tigana is not one of those books (although Kay does fall into the common fantasy-genre trap of creating characters who uniformly beautiful). Compared to other fantasy works, Tigana is 5 stars.

Tigana is a fresh take on some well-traveled topic: foreign invaders, struggle, revolution. I especially enjoy his dwelling on the removal of the name Tigana from the world: I agree with him that one's name is one of the few things that you possess forever, and the removal of your name is one of the most cruel punishments possible. This punishment was enacted by the "villain" Brandin, who in my eyes was the most real, interesting, and provocative character in the story. If only the other characters were as evocative as him.

Kay's weaknesses are love, and getting carried away with description. **spoiler** The only love I found real in the story was that found between Dianora and Brandin, the other bonds seemed quite shallow. Especially that between Alessan and Catriana (who spent the entire story seemingly in love with Devin, only held back by her very thick shell...what happened there to change her mind? Kay never explains). And Kay spends far too much time describing the past of characters who matter little to the story, such that of the Healer. The character of Alienor seems to be extraneous and unneeded as well.

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: Great idea to start with, great characters, everything is ready for a great story... and it never happens... the second half of the books has a few unconnected action scenes, and too many Jordan-like shallow introspection moments.
Even the final battle fails to be epic, it is told as an accounting issue/struggle suspended in time (so many left against so many, etc.)
Kay is good in creating contexts and characters but weak on describing action scenes. in "Song of Arbonne" and "Lions of Al-Rassan" (both get 5+ stars) it did not show as badly as in this one.
Too bad, can we ask him to rewrite the second half? ;-)

Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable
Review: I don't remember exactly why I picked up this book - I purchased it at a book store - but whatever it was I'm glad I did. While I am a not a hard-core fantasy reader, I do count Tolkein as one of my favorites. Having recently made it through the Silmarillion, maybe reading that Kay helped with the editing of that work might have helped sway my decision.
From the first page I was sucked in and resented every time I had to put the book down. It's an incredible work. I don't know if its the concepts he works with or the reality of the characters he creates that I like more, but they are certainly much more complex that the average sci-fi/fantasy no-brainers on the market (this book most definitely does not fall into that category). What took me even more by surprise was the seeming ease at which both the world and the characters were created - it does not seem forced but natural and quite easy to accept.
This was the first book I've read by Kay and I'm eagerly anticipating reading more.

Rating:
Summary: Land of beuty, land of horror
Review: Tigana is a story which looks at our past. It is a story of a land that is striped of its history, and shows you can't have a future with out a past. This isn't a story of good vs evil. Both the protaginists and the antaginists are shown doing very comendable things, and are shown doing horribly things. Where hate and love coexist in the same heart.

Rating:
Summary: Tigana
Review: I really wanted to like this book, but it was of no avail. Kay is fairly decent at introducing characters, its just that almost nothing happens afterwards. I think that a good author introduces his characters through their actions and allows them to develope in the course of the narrative. Kay introduces characters by telling us about them. The vast majority of the actions they commit that would allow us to know about them were committed in the past during one of the many backflashes. Very little happens in the present. In the end it feels like he got the initial introductions done (albeit long windedly) but then the novel ends before anything has really changed our veiws of them. In addition to this problem very few of the characters are compelling. It is hard to sympathize with them. In the end of the novel the tyrant that you are supposed to hate was the only character i truly liked or fealt compassion for. Obviously, I think he intentionally made Brandin a sympathetic character in order to add to the political ambiguity of the work, and while this choice may have added a dimension of complexity and interest in most cases, rather than having a stock evil villain, it backfires for Kay because his other characters are so uncompelling. They are far less sympathetic that the villain. You never get to care for them because rather than building your affection for any one character Kay goes on introducing more people that never do anything for the plot. I can only believe that he may have initially had a much larger scale in mind for the story. Perhaps it should have been a series rather than a book, but while he cut out enough of the plot to fit into a 700 page novel, he left all of the characters present with nothing to do. The final result seems hollow.

In regards to plot, it is all too abstract. There are never those moments in which your heart is pounding and you have to keep reading. There are moments in which you are genuinely interested, but they are too few, and nothing is truly memorable. Perhaps this is an inevitable result of the fact that you dont really care for the characters. It is difficult to care what happens to most of them. But it probably also has to do with the fact that he follows five or six different plot threads so that he is too scattered in the narrative. When you take out all of the descriptive passages and backflashes, despite the length of the book, each plot strand gets very few actual pages to develope. I suppose that it is the same problem that I had with the characters. There are too many threads at the expense of real focus on any one element.
A positive point, is that kay is good at creating an ineresting world, though it is scarcely fantasy. It kept my interest in the book to some degree. Unfortunately, the interesting things that he mentions that help to create a cool new world are all mentioned multiple times, so that by the end of the book they seems very repetetive. How many times does he have to mention death wheels? I can only say that as a whole the book does not stand up very well. It feels empty and unsatisfying and left me very disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Not Your Average Fantasy Book
Review: I certainly cannot add anything beyond what other reviewers have written here. Tigana is one of the most compelling books I have ever encountered, and is extraordinary in the fantasy genre for several reasons.

One, it's a work that can stand alone. You needn't make a commitment to read 9 other books in a series as in, for example, The Wheel of Time. Secondly, the characters are portrayed with all the genuine ambiguity that is inherent in being human. None, even Alberico the Tyrant, is a black-and-white charaterization.

Many books have moved me, made me cry, and made me jump on to amazon.com to order all the author's other works. However, this is the first book that had me exclaim aloud at a plot twist (for those who have read it -- when Rhun's past is made known). This is the first book that I have begun re-reading as soon as I finished it. This is the first book that I have bought a second copy of to loan out to my friends because I could not bear to have my original leave my hands.

Read the other reviews, then enter the world of Tigana. You will not come out the same as you went in.

Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful, Intriguing Story
Review: Tigana is a fascinating read- the story is both beautiful and intriguing, and obviously carefully crafted. Though the world the action takes place in is very different from ours, the characters and issues are refreshingly human. If you don't pick up Tigana now, you'll miss out on a LOT.