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christopherc 's review for:
Peace
by Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe's 1975 novel Peace seems to be the scattered recollections of Alden Dennis Weer, an old man who has lived all his life in a a small Midwestern town. But as the novel unfolds, we feel that he's not being entirely honest with us. Furthermore, in a fantastical twist, the old man sometimes seems to take an active role in the history that he reminisces on.
Peace was originally published by Harper & Row in an utterly anonymous plain tan dustcover and went unnoticed by most of the reading public. This Orb reprint in 1995 is also getting hard to find, unless you're content with a used copy. But don't let the difficulty of obtaining the novel put you off, for Peace deserves to rank among the literary classics of all time. Wolfe has created an intricate narrative that offers something new every time you read it. On an initial reading, the book may seem a certain kind of story, satisfying in itself. Upon re-reading Peace, you'll think "Aha, now I think I've got it". A third reading will present still another expanded insight, and so on. I must have read Peace six or seven times over the last 13 years, and on my last re-reading I still discovered new aspects to Weer's story. And all this in just 250 pages; how many other novels offer such well-nigh infinite pleasures?
Part of why Peace is such a powerful book is the unreliable narrator, as well as the way that mysteries raised early on are solved much later in the book by revelations so casual that an unattentive reader may well miss them. These are a perennial feature of Wolfe's writing. But Wolfe's output in the 1970s was also adorned with an excellent prose style, where we find such lovely passages as these:
“It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.”
“If I had been older, I would have told her I did, and I would -- after the fashion of older people -- have been telling the truth. I had sensed that cutting the rope was only a joke; I had also sensed that beneath the joke there was a strain of earnestness, and I was not mature enough yet to subscribe fully to that convention by which such underlying, embarassing thoughts are ignored -- as we ignore the dead trees in a garden because they have been overgrown with morning-glories or climbing roses at the urging of the clever gardener.”
Such mediations are reminiscent of Proust, and in fact there's a direct allusion to Proust late in the novel. Comparisons with Nabokov are also easy to draw as well. If you like those two authors, then I implore you to read Peace. I feel like my encounter with these melancholy memoirs of Alden Dennis Weer has been lifechanging.
Peace was originally published by Harper & Row in an utterly anonymous plain tan dustcover and went unnoticed by most of the reading public. This Orb reprint in 1995 is also getting hard to find, unless you're content with a used copy. But don't let the difficulty of obtaining the novel put you off, for Peace deserves to rank among the literary classics of all time. Wolfe has created an intricate narrative that offers something new every time you read it. On an initial reading, the book may seem a certain kind of story, satisfying in itself. Upon re-reading Peace, you'll think "Aha, now I think I've got it". A third reading will present still another expanded insight, and so on. I must have read Peace six or seven times over the last 13 years, and on my last re-reading I still discovered new aspects to Weer's story. And all this in just 250 pages; how many other novels offer such well-nigh infinite pleasures?
Part of why Peace is such a powerful book is the unreliable narrator, as well as the way that mysteries raised early on are solved much later in the book by revelations so casual that an unattentive reader may well miss them. These are a perennial feature of Wolfe's writing. But Wolfe's output in the 1970s was also adorned with an excellent prose style, where we find such lovely passages as these:
“It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.”
“If I had been older, I would have told her I did, and I would -- after the fashion of older people -- have been telling the truth. I had sensed that cutting the rope was only a joke; I had also sensed that beneath the joke there was a strain of earnestness, and I was not mature enough yet to subscribe fully to that convention by which such underlying, embarassing thoughts are ignored -- as we ignore the dead trees in a garden because they have been overgrown with morning-glories or climbing roses at the urging of the clever gardener.”
Such mediations are reminiscent of Proust, and in fact there's a direct allusion to Proust late in the novel. Comparisons with Nabokov are also easy to draw as well. If you like those two authors, then I implore you to read Peace. I feel like my encounter with these melancholy memoirs of Alden Dennis Weer has been lifechanging.