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262 of 277 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding, but not an unqualified recommendation..., May 24, 2001
This review is from: Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (Paperback)
I've read some of the reader reviews of "Shadow and Claw" and come to the conclusion that the book needs an introduction. Many of the negative reviews, I think, come from readers who weren't familiar with Gene Wolfe's writing style, which is understandable. So let me say for Wolfe that you cannot by any means read "The Book of the New Sun" the way you would ordinarily read a book. This mostly stems from the fact that the book is supposed to be an autobiography, and the writer, Severian, really can't be trusted to describe things accurately. A pretty good example would be the first woman Severian becomes interested in, Agia. He tells us that she was the most unattractive woman he has ever been attracted to. Fine, but the way that he becomes somewhat obsessed with her at a glance would suggest otherwise, and the way she treats him would account for his recalling her as being ugly. This is a minor example, to be sure, because it is a matter of Severian's perspective. There were other times in the book that I got the impression that Severian was telling flat-out lies. It's confusing, but it makes the book extremely interesting to read, simply because you are able to figure out much of what actually happened. Another thing to keep in mind, as somebody said in a quote on Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," (I forget who, and don't really care to find out, mostly because I'm lazy) is that Wolfe is "a master of the casual revelation." Which is to say that Severian will out of nowhere mention some vital piece of information, apparently assuming that we already knew about it. And we probably would know were we from his world, as he assumes we are. The only other thing to be aware of is the vocabulary, which thankfully is not nearly as difficult as people have described it. By and large, you won't have to look up the words being used simply because while you may not what an individual word means, you can infer it's meaning from the sentence it is used in. I started out looking up words constantly, and found that they mostly meant what I had already assumed they did. This is not to say that you shouldn't have a dictionary on hand, but looking up every word used that you don't know would be excessive. If all this sounds intimidating, I highly recommend that you read "Cerberus" which will give you a better handle on Wolfe's style. It's great book, and a good place to start if you are unfamiliar with Gene Wolfe. (If you do take my advice, it would be good to note that Severian's writing style is most similar to the first novella in "Cerberus.") The main thing I want to be clear on is that you shouldn't start reading this book expecting another "Lord of the Rings." While it can be argued that the "New Sun" series is of a similar calibur in terms of greatness, these are entirely different books. "LOTR" is an entertaining story, and you don't have to read into it at all. Everything you need to know is right there on the pages. The "New Sun" series is a bit more literary (Which sounds like a cultural elitist term, but I can't think of another one. Rest assured, I don't mean to belittle "LOTR" in any way, shape or form). If you're reading purely for an entertaining story, you would probably do well to look elsewhere.
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136 of 149 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the great literary achievements of fantasy, December 15, 2001
This review is from: Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (Paperback)
Like thousands of teenagers, I came of age with *The Lord of the Rings*. The rather ugly Bakshi movie was the first one I went to see without my parents, and the novel was virtually the first one I ever read that was not a children's book, except for Jules Verne's *Mysterious Island*. Just like many Tolkien fans, I became a lifelong devotee of the fantasy genre, and explored the more promising of the other Middle-Earths, from Lankhmar to the Dark Shore, Lyonesse, Majipoor, Amber, Earthsea and the world of the Hyborean Age. But of all the fantasy series I ever read, the only that ever compared to Tolkien's masterpiece in my opinion was Gene Wolfe's *New Urth* tetralogy. The others were fun, imaginative, full of action and adventure, but they either failed to maintain throughout the literary and spiritual power I had found in *The Lord of the Rings* or to equal the richness of its world-building. Interestingly enough, however different Tolkien's and Wolfe's epics might be, they share two profound similarities. First, both were written by Catholics and infused with their author's faith. With Tolkien, all the trappings of religion are evacuated from the world itself while the story is saturated with religious symbolism. With Wolfe, on the contrary, Christianity is still very present but transformed, as if through layers and layers of rewriting, into a distant shadow of itself. There is only one God, Pancreator or Panjudicator ; an almost legendary «Conciliator» walked the earth eons ago and is still venerated by the order of the Pelerines ; and priests, rituals, sacred items and guilds abound, as in the Golden Age of Christianity. The other similarity between the two sagas is the spiritual nature of their ultimate magical item. In *The Lord of the Rings*, the object is the ring itself, each successive use of which is a step on the path to damnation - conferring power on Earth in exchange for another fraction of the user's soul, as witnessed in the various states of spiritual decrepitude of those who have succumbed to the temptation. In *The Book of the New Sun*, the most powerful item is the Claw of the Conciliator - «the most valuable relic in existence», a gem that «performs miraculous cures... forgives injuries, raises the dead, draws new races of beings from the soil, purifies lust and so on. All the things [the Conciliator] is supposed to have done himself.» In other words, Tolkien's ring is the Devil ; Wolfe's Claw is God : an interesting symmetry. The texture of the two worlds, however, is very different. Middle Earth seems to be set in a distant past, barely threatened by the first premises of industrialization. Urth on the other hand is our own world millenia hence, a decaying planet waiting for a promised rebirth, frozen in some static medieval social order, incapable of producing any complex artefact except by magic, and borrowing fragments of more advanced technologies from its own past or from the mysterious hierodules, elusive offworlders who only have transactions with selected individuals on Urth and seem to be guiding the world's destiny in some occult fashion. Tolkien was obviously not Wolfe's major influence. The world Severian, his first-person narrator, so entrancingly describes seems to be a mixture of Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Peake's Gormenghast, a labyrinthine urban world rather than an enchanted primeval setting, filled with Lovecraftian horrors and filtered through the literary sensibilities of an admirer of Jorge Luis Borges. So if you know that you will not recapture the wonder of *The Lord of the Rings* by reading any of its countless rehashes, and are seeking for an original voice of comparable eloquence, the *New Sun* cycle is for you : open the gate to the necropolis, unsheathe *Terminus Est* and come drink the analeptic alzabo. *Shadow and Claw* brings together in one volume the first two novels in the series, *The Shadow of the Torturer* and *The Claw of the Conciliator*. It is followed by *Sword and Citadel*, the conclusion of the original series, initially published in two volumes, and *Urth of the New Sun*, which I have not read yet. Wolfe further expanded the saga with the books of the Long Sun and Short Sun, comprising seven volumes so far. And readers who have fallen in love with his universe will also be interested in *The Castle of the Otter* (1983), a collection of essays he wrote on the *New Sun* cycle ; *Lexicon Urthus*, a New Sun encyclopedia ; and GURPS New Sun, the role playing game based on the series.
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56 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A marvelously complex work--Gene Wolfe's magnum opus, February 14, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (Paperback)
The Book of the New Sun is an amazing literary work. The language is poetic (and have your Oxford English Dictionary close at hand), the images are beautiful and strange, and the thoughts--almost essays--of the narrator lead the reader to look at the story, and life, in a whole new light. This is a book of revelations, a book of thoughts; each time one reads it, it is somehow a different story. Each time I think I grasp something, it shifts into "something rich and strange" (in the words of Shakespeare). The plot is relatively simple. Severian, an apprentice of the torturer's guild, is exiled for an act of mercy, and he must wander the distant future world of Urth. Urth is a world in which the sun is dying, and there is a prophecy that the New Sun will come to renew life to the world. Urth has generated a spacefaring empire, but in the millenia that empire has collapsed, and Urth is older even than that. In one of the volumes, we learn that excavations present us not with fossils of dinosaurs but with the fossils of previous civilizations. The sands of the seashore, it is rumored, are not sediment but rather ground bits of glass from generations of cities. Perhaps a million years have passed since our time--perhaps more. Wolfe is able to evoke this distant world--a human world that is at once both alien and familiar--by the use of archaic words and by his depiction of future artifacts and monuments whose meaning and purpose has been lost in the interval of time between us and Severian. Urth is a world of staggering technology, built on an epic scale, but it is also a world filled with philosophy and mysticism. Severian, who has lived his entire life in the Citadel, discovers this world even as the reader does. And the imagination that goes into constructing this distant world is astounding. As the reader finds new mysteries and new angles in Severian's narrative, the reader is compelled to ask: What is this story? On one level, The Book of the New Sun seeks to define just what a story IS. The reader thus sets out on a quest every bit as strange and multifaceted as Severian's quest. The book is as much a paradox as a tale, but it is also fine, enlightening entertainment that can be read on a number of levels. I highly recommend this book.
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