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cookedw 's review for:
Shadow & Claw
by Gene Wolfe
Severin is quite an unlikeable narrator, but one of the things I appreciated the most about this is just how passive he feels here. While he certainly has a big ego (tell me again Mr. Unreliable Narrator about your perfect memory and how many women want your hot bod), his narrative feels much more like that of a bumbling fool, bouncing from one misguided adventure to another, rather than the typical "brave knight battling all the baddies" that fantasy can so often be reduced to.
The language here is both a plus and a minus -- it is beautiful, and by using archaic English, Wolfe channels an otherworldliness here that is simultaneously right at home with the distant past which the style of the Middle Ages, technology-deficient world understood by our narrator as well as the distant future in which the story takes place. At the same time, by combining this archaic, wordy prose with a narrator that gets mired in quandary after quandary, the book can at times read quite slow.
This book frequently feels just out of reach, which I really enjoyed -- by having the central character be someone who seems to be slightly behind/unaware, there's a dreamlike quality here that works really well as a fantasy story.
The language here is both a plus and a minus -- it is beautiful, and by using archaic English, Wolfe channels an otherworldliness here that is simultaneously right at home with the distant past which the style of the Middle Ages, technology-deficient world understood by our narrator as well as the distant future in which the story takes place. At the same time, by combining this archaic, wordy prose with a narrator that gets mired in quandary after quandary, the book can at times read quite slow.
This book frequently feels just out of reach, which I really enjoyed -- by having the central character be someone who seems to be slightly behind/unaware, there's a dreamlike quality here that works really well as a fantasy story.