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Loading... Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'by Gene WolfeSeries: The Book of the New Sun (Omnibus 1-2), Solar Cycle (omnibus 5-6)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Gene Wolfe's masterwork. Very rich language, very challenging prose, exotic settings, a plot that needs some deciphering. A must read! (  ) dread_dragon | Oct 21, 2009 |  Gene Wolfe's masterwork. Very rich language, very challenging prose, exotic settings, a plot that needs some deciphering. A must read! ( ) dread_dragon | Oct 21, 2009 | This book is really complicated and difficult to understand because it is written in a highly developed and detailed world the author has created. Wolfe also has a very strange writing style--he writes in first person narration but the narrator, Severian, is very untrustworthy and skips over things sometimes, meaning that the reader has to figure a lot of stuff out for themselves. From what I can tell people either love or hate Wolfe's style, and in my case I love it. ( ) laurenbethy | Jun 16, 2009 | First half of the Book of the New Sun tetralogy. So different than the run-of-the-mill postindustrial SFF world. In fact, for most of the first book, it isn’t clear whether this is a postindustrial or some kind of alternate medieval world. The language style is more epic and formal than most, too. But how can I not be impressed by a story that is not only metatextual, but at one point has two characters discuss semiotics, in a perfectly natural way? (  ) friuduric | Jan 25, 2009 | I can feel and understand the genius of this work but I am -at least at this stage in my life- unable to express my feelings of admiration for this work and delight thereof. Suffice it to say, I still can not believe such a work can be created by a human being. I can not begin to understand the workings of such a mind especially when it comes to understanding the ability of expression of such complicated thoughts,impressions,ideas beautifully and pampering the intelligence of the reader. It is a must read but beware it is hard to tackle. If you persevere, you will be rewarded more than fairly. ( ) Tywin | Oct 2, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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This is the first-person narrative of Severian, a lowly apprentice torturer blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future Urth, and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colorful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters, and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book 2 do we realize what saved Severian's life in chapter 1.) For lovers of literary allusions, they are plenty here: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges, and familiar fables changed by eons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much-restored painting of a golden-visored "knight," really an astronaut standing on the moon, and an ancient citadel of metal towers, actually grounded spacecraft. Even the sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a new sun.
The Book of the New Sun is almost heartbreakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:20 -0400)
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