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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
dark
slow-paced
You SHOULD read this book if:
* You would be enticed to visit a world more fantastic and alien than most (but not all) other sci-fi novels I've encountered.
* You like far future science fiction. This book is considered to be one of the best. I do think it is good personally.
* You're a linguist
You SHOULD NOT read this book if:
* You'd hate to look up words on a frequent basis.
* You'd hate being confused and given partial answers at times (if you get answers at all)
* You're put off by slow starts
Before saying anything else, I'd like to list the words I had to Google during the read. Mind you this list is severely amputated, as I only started recording 3/4 through the book and only when I did not tire of holding my cell phone in my non-reading hand:
"perspicacity, chiliad, perfunctory, arbalest, howdah, eidolon, alcalde, odalisque, analeptic, cadre, effluvium, pelagic, argosy, quercine, penetralia, agouti, uhlan, vasculum, llanero, thiasus, trumeau, pavonine, clepsydra, nenuphar..."
Gene Wolfe tries to convey an unusual yet familiarly feudal world in the far future. Not Fallout far future, where husks of building loom over you like unmoved proctors, while irradiated cockroaches and fused biological chimeras accost your journey. No, it's so far in the future that all those buildings have become husks, toppled, been buried, been shuffled under the crust of the earth, compacted into metamorphic alloys, uplifted, mined, and reused to make an iron sword. Not only are you and everyone you know dead, but so much time has passed that chronology has ground any and every atom you ever touched in your lifetime to be reformed into new molecules a million times each. I can't even imagine so far a time point. Anything and everything is unfamiliar. Everything, except the lifestyle niches and economic needs required filled by a heterogeneous sapient population.
To me, this must be what it was like when someone first read "The Lord of the Rings" in 1954. No context for what elves or dwarves or hobbits are. The reader didn't have three movies, three prequels, and an Amazon TV series rely on for lore. They only had the analogy of the author when inventing terminology to describe a vision of a world much different than our own. It is a truly alien feeling. Gene Wolfe uses anachronistic language to give name to these alien things in his world. Descriptions help to imagine, but the disconnect between the author five million years hence and us in the now makes it like reading a story through the Rosetta Stone.
Without waxing further, the book is just hard to read at times. I have no idea what the reading level is, but Google seems to suggest "high level". Someone on Reddit states not suggesting it to anyone who isn't reading at a college level. I don't want to bar a novel from anyone interested, but I do agree that the terminology gets tough to climb. Sometimes I found it a slog. Despite that, I wanted to get through it.
This jargon quagmire, along with the slow start to the novel, the inability for me to sympathize with someone who is raised a career torturer/headsman had me want to shelve the book several times. Easier "book comfort food" called to me often. However, I found myself unable to turn away from the world built. "There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden." This book quote is highlighted to give the best basis that props up these novels. Plantae weaponry, abnormal humans, mystical objects, memory transfer, horse and carriage contrasted with futuristic planes that wow the population. All of this filtered through the interpretation of a relative middle ages serf.
To shorten it, Confused and Intrigued is my succinct feelings most of the time.
I kept going because I wanted to see more of this distant world, evolved over five million years. I'd give the book 3/5 because of how hard I had to work to get to the end. A younger me would have given up less than one-hundred pages in. However, the feeling Gene Wolfe leaves me after the book is closed brings the review up to 4/5.
I hope this helps you decide on reading the story. I put the short review at the front so that this rant can be excised quickly for those who'd prefer to a quick answer. Thanks for getting this far.
* You would be enticed to visit a world more fantastic and alien than most (but not all) other sci-fi novels I've encountered.
* You like far future science fiction. This book is considered to be one of the best. I do think it is good personally.
* You're a linguist
You SHOULD NOT read this book if:
* You'd hate to look up words on a frequent basis.
* You'd hate being confused and given partial answers at times (if you get answers at all)
* You're put off by slow starts
Before saying anything else, I'd like to list the words I had to Google during the read. Mind you this list is severely amputated, as I only started recording 3/4 through the book and only when I did not tire of holding my cell phone in my non-reading hand:
"perspicacity, chiliad, perfunctory, arbalest, howdah, eidolon, alcalde, odalisque, analeptic, cadre, effluvium, pelagic, argosy, quercine, penetralia, agouti, uhlan, vasculum, llanero, thiasus, trumeau, pavonine, clepsydra, nenuphar..."
Gene Wolfe tries to convey an unusual yet familiarly feudal world in the far future. Not Fallout far future, where husks of building loom over you like unmoved proctors, while irradiated cockroaches and fused biological chimeras accost your journey. No, it's so far in the future that all those buildings have become husks, toppled, been buried, been shuffled under the crust of the earth, compacted into metamorphic alloys, uplifted, mined, and reused to make an iron sword. Not only are you and everyone you know dead, but so much time has passed that chronology has ground any and every atom you ever touched in your lifetime to be reformed into new molecules a million times each. I can't even imagine so far a time point. Anything and everything is unfamiliar. Everything, except the lifestyle niches and economic needs required filled by a heterogeneous sapient population.
To me, this must be what it was like when someone first read "The Lord of the Rings" in 1954. No context for what elves or dwarves or hobbits are. The reader didn't have three movies, three prequels, and an Amazon TV series rely on for lore. They only had the analogy of the author when inventing terminology to describe a vision of a world much different than our own. It is a truly alien feeling. Gene Wolfe uses anachronistic language to give name to these alien things in his world. Descriptions help to imagine, but the disconnect between the author five million years hence and us in the now makes it like reading a story through the Rosetta Stone.
Without waxing further, the book is just hard to read at times. I have no idea what the reading level is, but Google seems to suggest "high level". Someone on Reddit states not suggesting it to anyone who isn't reading at a college level. I don't want to bar a novel from anyone interested, but I do agree that the terminology gets tough to climb. Sometimes I found it a slog. Despite that, I wanted to get through it.
This jargon quagmire, along with the slow start to the novel, the inability for me to sympathize with someone who is raised a career torturer/headsman had me want to shelve the book several times. Easier "book comfort food" called to me often. However, I found myself unable to turn away from the world built. "There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden." This book quote is highlighted to give the best basis that props up these novels. Plantae weaponry, abnormal humans, mystical objects, memory transfer, horse and carriage contrasted with futuristic planes that wow the population. All of this filtered through the interpretation of a relative middle ages serf.
To shorten it, Confused and Intrigued is my succinct feelings most of the time.
I kept going because I wanted to see more of this distant world, evolved over five million years. I'd give the book 3/5 because of how hard I had to work to get to the end. A younger me would have given up less than one-hundred pages in. However, the feeling Gene Wolfe leaves me after the book is closed brings the review up to 4/5.
I hope this helps you decide on reading the story. I put the short review at the front so that this rant can be excised quickly for those who'd prefer to a quick answer. Thanks for getting this far.
adventurous
challenging
funny
inspiring
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Oh, the fun with language here is right up my alley.
The Shadow of the Torturer
I like books that read very literary – something with a high vocabulary level and often from using archaic words, a meandering to the painting of the scenery, a complexity to the voice and the flow of the language; something that forces me to take my time wandering through the words, watching the scenes appear piecemeal before me, slowly building and giving dimension to the world and plot, and hearing voices of the characters through their written words. There is a richness to such language and our experience of it that our simplified, bite-sized reading materials of today abhor all too frequently, a richness that reminds us just how nuanced and steeped in history our own languages are.
These elements are probably what I enjoyed the most from this first Book of the New Sun. It was a pleasant return to complex reading which requires a fair amount of concentration, attention, and brainpower not to consume, but to savor. It requires the reader to question Severian’s truthfulness, and his motivations behind what he shares and how, or not share.
Favorite Quotes from The Shadow of the Torturer:
Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. - page 11
All love that which they destroy. - page 32
"Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real."
[...]
"Nevertheless, we all seek to discover what is real." - page 66
When we are talking to women, we talk as though love and desire are two separate entities; and women, who often love us and sometimes desire us, maintain the same fiction. The fact is that they are aspects of the same thing [.] If we desire a woman, we soon come to love her for her condescension in submitting to us (this, indeed, had been the original foundation of my love for Thecla), and since if we desire her she always submits in imagination at least, some element of love is ever present. On the other hand, if we love her, we soon come to desire her, since attraction is one of the attributes a woman should possess, and we cannot bear to think she is without any of them; in this way men come to desire even women whose legs are locked in paralysis, and women to desire those men who are impotent save with men like themselves.
But no one can say from what it is that what we call (almost at our pleasure) love or desire is born.
[...]
I think it is in this that we find the real difference between those women to whom if we are to remain men we must offer our lives, and those who (again--if we are to remain men) we must overpower and outwit if we can, and use as we never would a beast: that the second will never permit us to give them what we give the first. - page 162
A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart. - page 184
Typos from The Shadow of the Torturer:
.... exchanged them for another's Those who arrived... - page 27 - miss period before "Those"
...you'll want to surprise your friends when you take off you mantle-- - page 108 - "you" should be "your" (doubtful this is an intentional error, as otherwise the shopkeeper speaks very well
...still thinking of Vodalu's slender blade, ... - page 109 - should be Vodalus'
...some distant noice brings back to my ears... - page 124 - "noice" should be "noise"
The Claw of the Conciliator
I can appreciate a well-written and complex book. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. I literally just finished this book two days ago, and barely remember with any detail what I just read. It’s all sort of a blur. Heck, it took me until like halfway or more through it to remember who Dorcas was, and even then, it was only once she was back on page.
Basically Severian made it with the traveling players through the wall, they got separated, and he was alone with Jonas, who has a metal hand (and more). Oh, I almost forgot about Severian’s little cave excursion and his discovery of some of what the Claw is capable of. He encountered Vodalus again, and had a trippy time with him – Thecla, the chatelaine he aided in the Citadel, is going to haunt him even more intimately now. We get our first real, solid, evidence-based experience of the advanced technology that had been in this world and spread across more planets – and therefore, that this Urth is our Earth near the end of the life of our Sun. Next, Severian found his way to the lands of the Autarch by getting himself jailed, past trailing people found him, and he got out with some luck and some acting. Just goes to show, if you act like you know what you’re doing and where you’re going, you can pretty easily get others to believe you and help you. We also get to read Dr. Talos’ play, and while it definitely reads like a roadmap to this entire Book of the New Sun, it is still a bit (intentionally) abstract. It’s probably best read again at the end of the series, when it will all make sense.
Oh yes, and I can’t forget the escalation of misogyny in Severian’s actions in this book. And worse. So trigger warning for rape, even though Severian treats it as just another sexual encounter – and later lists essentially all the women we have ever run into in these first two books and how much he wanted to or did have sex with them. He treats women like beautiful objects to be admired and enjoyed and used, even as he occasionally makes it seem as though he looks up to them (Thecla) for the intelligence and knowledge they have shared with him. Well, he might actually look up to Thecla, but that emotion quickly gets overtaken by objectification.
This book wasn’t so terrible that I couldn’t finish it for book club, but I did not enjoy it nearly enough on its own to have finished it if not for having book club. It is well-written, complex, detailed, and clearly knows where it’s going, but it’s also disturbing, misogynistic, and looks like a puzzle with big pieces put together but not so completed as to give us a solid idea of what the final image will be. I admit I did pick up the full quartet in hardcover for a quarter, but I don’t know if I’ll keep it or read it – especially since according to a book club member who has already read the whole thing, the payoff for reading the series doesn’t really come until book four anyways. That’s a bit of reading for any payoff when I feel so negatively about what I’ve already read.
Favorite quotes from The Claw of the Conciliator:
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin. – page 221
[“]People don’t want other people to be people. They throw names over them and lock them in[.”] – page 345
Typos from The Claw of the Conciliator:
For the others among the hodded ones grow impatient. – page 307 – “hodded” should be “hooded”
I like books that read very literary – something with a high vocabulary level and often from using archaic words, a meandering to the painting of the scenery, a complexity to the voice and the flow of the language; something that forces me to take my time wandering through the words, watching the scenes appear piecemeal before me, slowly building and giving dimension to the world and plot, and hearing voices of the characters through their written words. There is a richness to such language and our experience of it that our simplified, bite-sized reading materials of today abhor all too frequently, a richness that reminds us just how nuanced and steeped in history our own languages are.
These elements are probably what I enjoyed the most from this first Book of the New Sun. It was a pleasant return to complex reading which requires a fair amount of concentration, attention, and brainpower not to consume, but to savor. It requires the reader to question Severian’s truthfulness, and his motivations behind what he shares and how, or not share.
Favorite Quotes from The Shadow of the Torturer:
Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. - page 11
All love that which they destroy. - page 32
"Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real."
[...]
"Nevertheless, we all seek to discover what is real." - page 66
When we are talking to women, we talk as though love and desire are two separate entities; and women, who often love us and sometimes desire us, maintain the same fiction. The fact is that they are aspects of the same thing [.] If we desire a woman, we soon come to love her for her condescension in submitting to us (this, indeed, had been the original foundation of my love for Thecla), and since if we desire her she always submits in imagination at least, some element of love is ever present. On the other hand, if we love her, we soon come to desire her, since attraction is one of the attributes a woman should possess, and we cannot bear to think she is without any of them; in this way men come to desire even women whose legs are locked in paralysis, and women to desire those men who are impotent save with men like themselves.
But no one can say from what it is that what we call (almost at our pleasure) love or desire is born.
[...]
I think it is in this that we find the real difference between those women to whom if we are to remain men we must offer our lives, and those who (again--if we are to remain men) we must overpower and outwit if we can, and use as we never would a beast: that the second will never permit us to give them what we give the first. - page 162
A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart. - page 184
Typos from The Shadow of the Torturer:
.... exchanged them for another's Those who arrived... - page 27 - miss period before "Those"
...you'll want to surprise your friends when you take off you mantle-- - page 108 - "you" should be "your" (doubtful this is an intentional error, as otherwise the shopkeeper speaks very well
...still thinking of Vodalu's slender blade, ... - page 109 - should be Vodalus'
...some distant noice brings back to my ears... - page 124 - "noice" should be "noise"
The Claw of the Conciliator
I can appreciate a well-written and complex book. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. I literally just finished this book two days ago, and barely remember with any detail what I just read. It’s all sort of a blur. Heck, it took me until like halfway or more through it to remember who Dorcas was, and even then, it was only once she was back on page.
Basically Severian made it with the traveling players through the wall, they got separated, and he was alone with Jonas, who has a metal hand (and more). Oh, I almost forgot about Severian’s little cave excursion and his discovery of some of what the Claw is capable of. He encountered Vodalus again, and had a trippy time with him – Thecla, the chatelaine he aided in the Citadel, is going to haunt him even more intimately now. We get our first real, solid, evidence-based experience of the advanced technology that had been in this world and spread across more planets – and therefore, that this Urth is our Earth near the end of the life of our Sun. Next, Severian found his way to the lands of the Autarch by getting himself jailed, past trailing people found him, and he got out with some luck and some acting. Just goes to show, if you act like you know what you’re doing and where you’re going, you can pretty easily get others to believe you and help you. We also get to read Dr. Talos’ play, and while it definitely reads like a roadmap to this entire Book of the New Sun, it is still a bit (intentionally) abstract. It’s probably best read again at the end of the series, when it will all make sense.
Oh yes, and I can’t forget the escalation of misogyny in Severian’s actions in this book. And worse. So trigger warning for rape, even though Severian treats it as just another sexual encounter – and later lists essentially all the women we have ever run into in these first two books and how much he wanted to or did have sex with them. He treats women like beautiful objects to be admired and enjoyed and used, even as he occasionally makes it seem as though he looks up to them (Thecla) for the intelligence and knowledge they have shared with him. Well, he might actually look up to Thecla, but that emotion quickly gets overtaken by objectification.
This book wasn’t so terrible that I couldn’t finish it for book club, but I did not enjoy it nearly enough on its own to have finished it if not for having book club. It is well-written, complex, detailed, and clearly knows where it’s going, but it’s also disturbing, misogynistic, and looks like a puzzle with big pieces put together but not so completed as to give us a solid idea of what the final image will be. I admit I did pick up the full quartet in hardcover for a quarter, but I don’t know if I’ll keep it or read it – especially since according to a book club member who has already read the whole thing, the payoff for reading the series doesn’t really come until book four anyways. That’s a bit of reading for any payoff when I feel so negatively about what I’ve already read.
Favorite quotes from The Claw of the Conciliator:
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin. – page 221
[“]People don’t want other people to be people. They throw names over them and lock them in[.”] – page 345
Typos from The Claw of the Conciliator:
For the others among the hodded ones grow impatient. – page 307 – “hodded” should be “hooded”
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated