feeling myself becoming a citadel of the autarch hater in real time as i am brought face to face with gene wolfe’s bad communism metaphor.
like i can’t say i’m on board with all the catholicism either but at least that’s written in an interesting and thoughtful way.
still thinking about this. definitely, definitely not a Citadel of the Autarch hater in the final accounting; it’s the most flawed of the four books absolutely but i’m broadly very positive on it. on the level of sentence and imagery there’s some of Wolfe’s strongest writing in there. this is true even around the weakest part of the book (the ascians): “behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts” is just a banger sentence.
speaking of the ascians, in the end they still don’t really work for me. beyond some good prose (see above) i didn’t find anything more interesting there which would have made me move beyond my initial reaction (which was that they’re a trite piece of cold war imaginary). i know that some people have drawn more out of text here, but i find myself unable to meet it half way on this one.
i don’t really have a big summative statement about the Book of the New Sun. i feel bad that most of the substantive posting i’ve done about the books is criticising what is ultimately a very minor part of them.
i had a really good time with the books and it was mostly weird (good) rather than weird (bad). on balance i think that Shadow and Sword are the two books that work best for me. Severian in Nessus post exile and Severian in the mountains are for me the absolute peak. Some of the best shit i’ve ever read. imagining the alternate version of myself wandering the corridors of time who read these books at a formative age and was obsessed.