I have really mixed feelings about this. On one hand the book is populated by a number of brilliant vignettes, on the other hand Cugel the Clever is such an unlikable dick that I just about can't stand reading stories with him. In addition, while the first book certainly didn't have any binding plot, everything was tied together thematically. Here, it is just a crap episodic quest story, where the stories are tied together by the fact that Cugel has to move through the world to get back with the McGuffin. So, while the previous book felt interlaced, this is just another "and then this happened" story. That said, some pretty awesome stuff happens, and it is packed with Vance's crazy vocab and intricate conversations. It can be a little wearing at times as all the characters in the book are sociopaths, but it does help you not sympathize with most of the characters that Cugel screws over along the way. Tough call to rate, but it absolutely is a much better book looking back on it than it is experiencing it.

In which Cugel the Clever gets his just rewards.

Cugel is a huge piece of shit and it rocks

A series of incredibly imaginative encounter with a very basic frame story, a funny main character, and a hilarious end.

Cugel is a horrible little guy, and there's much about this novel which is problematic, but Vance's writing is so vivid and Cugel's roguishness so charming that I cannot help but enjoy it despite myself. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/it-might-be-dying-but-its-still-a-naughty-earth/

In a return to the Dying Earth setting, Vance here presents us with seven novelettes strung together as a sort of inverse quest narrative, in which our "hero" actually achieves his goal in the first one and spends the rest of the book trying to get home.

Cugel is a hell of a rogue main character, in the most classic sense of the word that he is just a bad guy. It's fascinating that while he does a lot of bad things, bad things also constantly happen to him in a tug-of-war of sympathy; it's never the people he wrongs that get back at him, it's always some greater or alien power that gets him.

Vance's prose is as baroque as ever, seemingly using the most grandiloquent lexemes possible at all times. Whereas his vocabulary is always fancy, his syntax, in contrast, is simple to the point of reminding me most of Aesop's Fables in its constant simple, even blunt, declarations. Intentional or not, it definitely works as a reflection of the personages that fill the page, so constantly full of themselves but never of much actual substance.

Be warned cuz it's definitely a sixties book where I'm not sure that "Cugel is an asshole" translates perfectly well with the, uh, use of women here. I get that Cugel literally "uses" women but it's not like there are any women in the book that seem to have any worth? Mmmaybe Derwe Coreme a little bit? But we are certainly a far cry from the empathetic portrayal of T'Sais in the first book, which is certainly odd.

5 star - Perfect
4 star - i would recommend
3 star - good
2 star - struggled to complete
1 star - could not finish