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Argali posted:Has anyone read any of his Wizard Knight books? I finally got around to these over the summer after meaning to read them for a while, and while in the end I was entertained, I also suppose I was somewhat disappointed. The world presented has some very intrigued facets (the layering of worlds, its connections to "our" world as so on), but they certainly aren't the focus of the story. A good way of describing it might be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court + The Lord of the Rings + a slightly autistic narrator. The story itself is classic Wolfe, in that there are hints of a lot of fantastic things, but none of those leads are ever explored or fleshed out fully -- a technique (tendency?) of his I'm rather ambivalent about. Suffice it to say, the "plot" as we get it is rather bland, and unusually enough I figured out most of the big riddles without too much strain.
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Sep 15, 2011 03:32
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Encryptic posted:
I think the great reason for this is that Wolfe takes as his forebears, in the most literary sense, Proust and Joyce, both writers who were concerned to varying degrees with being overwhelmed by the past, details, memory, history, literature, and so on. They were also modernists (or at least in Proust's case a sort of proto-Modernist), and as such they're concerned with the ways in which lived experience (which the fiction is meant to represent) exceeds the boundaries of something like a novelistic plot. Wolfe's narrators often can't focus their plots because they're not sure what to focus on -- literally too much is going on, and in the best cases they don't understand enough of it to latch onto what is really important, or in Severian's case, he doesn't have a good grasp on his readers' positions with relation to the text. And this, of course, discounts situations in which his narrators genuinely evade or manipulate the truth. Whether or not Wolfe's really successful in these regards is of course touch-and-go. For the record, I agree with Neurosis above about Cerberus, and would say it's probably a better intro to Wolfe than BotNS. The tendency to let the plot meander is helped by the fact that, as a novel, it is actually three facets of the same plot, so each part reveals something that illuminates the others.
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Oct 1, 2011 16:16
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One of my favorite moments of the past year was visiting the West coast for a conference and discovering Lexicon Urthus in a rare/used bookshop. I haven't done a full re-read since my first, I just skip around and grab parts that I vaguely remmeber or don't remember at all, and it's been a handy little book.
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Nov 21, 2011 04:57
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That's totally authentic. Wolfe printed it in his essay on Tolkien. Well, "totally authentic" if you want to trust Gene Wolfe narrating his own life. I guess.
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Jan 20, 2012 01:29
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Well, I never expected to get Michael Swanwick recs from this thread, because the two novels of his I've read have been some of the worst stuff I've ever encountered. To this day I actually use paragraphs from one of them (Jack Faust, specifically) to teach my freshmen students how not to construct sentences. I'll keep an eye out for Tide, though, and that tribute antho sounds neat.
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Mar 5, 2013 14:46
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Cherry Dare posted:Seriously? I feel like Swanwick is a good enough writer to break the rules of grammar for effect. (Unlike most freshman students.) Could you quote those paragraphs here? I don't use them because they break the rules of grammar. I use them because they're completely correct technically and they're still godawful writing. Swanwick has a tortuous and purple style (in, admittedly, the two novels I've read -- they may be flukes). Wolfe can be purple, too, but he's purple in a calculated way -- he often puts his weirdest words in the mouths of first-person narrators, which lets him sell strangeness as an idiolect. This also suggests his greater attention to prose as a medium. Swanwick seems to favor third-person omniscient narrators, narrators who talk about whispers in an "ophidian darkness" during a seduction scene without a hint of irony, and as a result those narrators end up sounding like an author trying to be incredibly self-important. I'm not going to bother quoting the paragraph I use with my students, since this isn't the "poo poo on Michael Swanwick" thread, but I'll PM you.
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Mar 6, 2013 00:13
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A brief Wolfe profile has gone up in the New Yorker. It's hardly anything familiar with him wouldn't know, but he opens up a little about his wife's Alzheimer's and death in 2013.
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Apr 25, 2015 05:13
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Space-Bird posted:It's kinda like reading a crazy person's journal, part insanity, part insight and part alien. This accurately describes anything produced by anyone who's particularly devoted to Wolfean theorycrafting. And I say this with all due affection, as a person who has a copy of Lexicon Urthus in a protective slipcase because I saw it in a rare bookshop and thought, "Why not."
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May 16, 2016 04:03
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