Scan barcode
A review by chaumps
Peace by Gene Wolfe
5.0
A rich, dark, confounding and spiralling memoir that left me with far more questions than answers. Questions such as: What does it mean to be dead? What is the relationship between the dead and the living? Does the human conscience have the capability to recognize evil within itself? And whose story of whose story am I listening to?
The entirety of the book is spent meandering through the narrator’s reminiscent stream of consciousness, waxing poetic on the jumbled and oddly arranged timeline of his life. The reader is plucked from memory to memory without any warning, and often left scrambling for details on date or setting. I’ve never read such an authentic and intriguing representation of the human mind.
Woven through the story are a collection of anecdotes, folklore, and fairy tales provided by a few of the notable people of his life, which seem to offer a few thematic correlations to some of the ambiguously worded recollections of the events in his real life. However (just like in any Wolfe story) much latitude is given to the reader to determine the depth and applicability of such. This has been a rewarding activity for me as I skim through the book for the second time.
I am already looking forward to revisiting this story again
The entirety of the book is spent meandering through the narrator’s reminiscent stream of consciousness, waxing poetic on the jumbled and oddly arranged timeline of his life. The reader is plucked from memory to memory without any warning, and often left scrambling for details on date or setting. I’ve never read such an authentic and intriguing representation of the human mind.
Woven through the story are a collection of anecdotes, folklore, and fairy tales provided by a few of the notable people of his life, which seem to offer a few thematic correlations to some of the ambiguously worded recollections of the events in his real life. However (just like in any Wolfe story) much latitude is given to the reader to determine the depth and applicability of such. This has been a rewarding activity for me as I skim through the book for the second time.
I am already looking forward to revisiting this story again