that is an intensely Felix comment
I’d approach Book of the New Sun as a texture read; enjoy each sentence and drift along the fragmented plot without worrying about putting it together. Pay attention to the emotional reads you get on the chapa[pso9
sorry, the fire alarm just buzzed in the office
once
…emotional reads you get on the characters; let those suspicions tumble around. Then read it again a month later.
I think your terminal colours are gonna be messed up now
To be clear, I actually am enjoying the book so far. The writing has this annoyingly pompous and obscurantist quality to it (e.g. referring to water lilies exclusively as “nenuphars.” Come on, dude!). He’s extremely particular and fastidious about building a certain atmosphere and he has no interest in meeting the reader halfway. But there actually is an evocative beauty to the prose. Wolfe seems like kind of a pain in the ass, but he’s not writing checks he can’t cash.
So yeah, tentative recommendation so far but we’ll see how I feel when I get beyond chapter 3.
you’re starting to realize Wolfe was really born under the astrological sign of the Shrug
it’s the new yorker fiction issue this week!!!
Protip: he is often doing this because they are not water lilies.
The first book’s appendix on “translation” is a useful guide to what he’s doing + a sign that Wolfe’s not nearly as self-serious as Severian.
the tulpa/shrug venn diagram overlaps quite a bit
This is spelled out in the appendix to shadow of the torturer and its well worth reading over that to get a sense of one of the things Wolfe is doing in the writing. FWIW, Wolfe is one of the few writers I can think of who pulls off the ‘obscurantist language for atmosphere’ trick, both because he uses that language very well and because there is a greater purpose to it than just style.
There’s a pair of cliches in sci fi writing, “Call a Rabbit a Smeerp” and “Call a Smeerp a Rabbit”. They’re pretty self explanatory. Gene Wolfe’s cleverness in Book of the New Sun is that he makes you think he’s calling a Rabbit a Smeerp when he’s actually calling a Smeerp a Smeerp and any references to rabbits are just there to help you imagine what it is he’s actually describing.
Autokaufen
this kind of take makes me think that we are mutually alien to each other as far as writing taste goes
oh yeah for sure
if you’re asking me to accept that much artifice without a single sex scene I’m out
if you wanted sex scenes, I could’ve told you to keep reading
Severian fucks his way across fantasy south america
I’ve never gotten all the way through the books but every time I make an attempt I get farther and get new stuff out of them.
They’re absolutely incredible.
yeah, the truth is that I just don’t like fantasy or sci fi that much without a videogame for it to hang off of, I don’t mean to shit up the thread. the only big sci fi novel I’ve ever gotten through is like, dune, and I was in eighth grade so all bets are off. I remember people recommending neuromancer and Lem and the elrik guy to me on the assumption that I needed something more wry and I eventually realized that a hundred percent of the time I’d rather read 19th century novels or MFA shit; there’s no helping some people.
If anything, Severian needs to fuck less than he does.
OK, so I went and read that “Notes on the Translation” appendix and that does help contextualize the odd use of language in the book. I wish that had been at the front instead of the back!
I also wish I hadn’t bought this new edition that stuffs the first two books into one volume. It looks so snazzy on the outside, but the font size turned out to be like 6px! Don’t know if I’ve ever read a book with print this small.
but all 19th century novels are fantasy novels anyway
I mean the library only lends out books for 14 days at a time (although I think I can renew it one time) so I’ll try, but I think a quick secondary skimming is more likely.
I did read the whole Book of the New Sun under a different library’s 21 day time limit which… was an experience. I figure I probably missed a lot as I think I only got what was going on on the surface, but it was still rather decent.