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.