/lit/ - Literature

I finished re-reading Gene Wolfe's Shadow Of The Torturer, the first part of Book Of The New Sun. As suspected, the second read was much more satisfying than the first. Allusions were better appreciated; the whole St Katherine thing, and Severian's philosophical moments (e.g. discussing where the life of a person resides) as well as foreshadowing. I also had the benefit of my annotations from a previous read which had decoded the vocabulary, making the reading experience a less disjointed one without running to a dictionary every so often.

I was also able to appreciate the plotting of this book even better, and its tonal shifts, which seemed to arrive every fifty pages or so; Sev's nostalgic childhood at the Matachin Tower and encounter with Vodalus; his reticent guild initiation and conflicted time with Thecla; his free-wheeling departure and quixotic botanical garden sequence; subsequent entanglement in worldly affairs by chance/deceit, a duel, and Dr Talo's play. And some of the lore is downright enticing to behold even at the reread - the green moon, the cacogens, the exultants, the little peaks of Urth history and fable, the throwaway anecdotes and puzzling asides. It's to his credit that Wolfe can string the reader along willingly while puzzling and confounding them - and judging by Severian's torturer/writer analogy near the end Wolfe is very deliberate in his methods.