/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21348704]

Is it any good? Or is it overhyped?

[Anonymous No.21348736]

>>21348704
It's overhyped trite. There's a review that pretty much tells you that its shit and its spot on.

[Anonymous No.21348749]

It's a forty year old book, read reviews and decide for yourself, if you are in fact not >>21348736 making this thread to shill the same review over and over again.

[Anonymous No.21348964]

read it and ignore /lit/. Most of them haven't read the book but will shit on it for le internet memery. It's a good book that requires your attention and rewards re-reads. Don't worry if you don't get it all the first time round that is normal.

[Anonymous No.21349049]

>>21348704
A teenager gets kicked out of his boarding school and goes on a journey of self discovery, and sex of questionable consent across post-post-post-apocalyptic South America. In this episode, he volunteers to fight in a futuristic version of Korean war, then finds out being the president of post×3-apocalyptic South America isn't easy.

[Anonymous No.21349059]

>>21348704
it's great, worth reading at least to see what you think

[Anonymous No.21349089]

Overall, I found nothing unique in Wolfe. Perhaps it's because I've read quite a bit of odd fantasy; if all I read was mainstream stuff, then I'd surely find Wolfe unpredictable, since he is a step above them. But compared to Leiber, Howard, Dunsany, Eddison, Kipling, Haggard, Peake, Mieville, or Moorcock, Wolfe is nothing special.

Perhaps I just got my hopes up too high. I imagined something that might evoke Peake or Leiber (at his best), perhaps with a complexity and depth gesturing toward Milton or Ariosto. I could hardly imagine a better book than that, but even a book half that good would be a delight--or a book that was nothing like that, but was unpredictable and seductive in some other way.

I kept waiting for something to happen, but it never really did. It all plods along without much rise or fall, just the constant moving action to make us think something interesting is happening. I did find some promise, some moments that I would have loved to see the author explore, particularly those odd moments where Silver Age Sci Fi crept in, but each time he touched upon these, he would return immediately to the smallness of his plot and his annoying prick of a narrator. I never found the book to be difficult or complex, merely tiring. the unusual parts were evasive and vague, and the dull parts constant and repetitive.

The whole structure (or lack of it) does leave things up to interpretation, and perhaps that's what some readers find appealing: that they can superimpose their own thoughts and values onto the narrator, and onto the plot itself. But at that point, they don't like the book Wolfe wrote, they like the book they are writing between his lines.

[Anonymous No.21349098]

>>21349089
Then there is the fact that every character you meet in the story turns up again, hundreds of miles away, to reveal that they are someone else and have been secretly controlling the action of the plot. It feels like the entire world is populated by about fifteen people who follow the narrator around wherever he goes. If the next two books continue along the same lines, then the big reveal will be that the world is entirely populated by no more than three superpowered shapeshifters.

Everyone in the book has secret identities, secret connections to grand conspiracies, and important plot elements that they conveniently hide until the last minute, only doling out clues here and there. There are no normal people in this world, only double agents and kings in disguise. Every analysis I've read of this book mentions that even the narrator is unreliable.

This can be an effective technique, but in combination with a world of infinite, unpredictable intrigue, Wolfe's story begins to evoke something between a soap opera and a convoluted mystery novel, relying on impossible and contradictory scenarios to mislead the audience. Apparently, this is the thing his fans most appreciate about him--I find it to be an insulting and artificial game.

I agree with this reviewer that there is simply not enough structure to the story to make the narrator's unreliability meaningful. In order for unreliable narration to be effective, there must be some clear and evident counter-story that undermines it. Without that, it is not possible to determine meaning, because there's nowhere to start: everything is equally shaky.

At that point, it's just a trick--adding complexity to the surface of the story without actually producing any new meaning. I know most sci fi and fantasy authors seem to love complexity for its own sake, but it's a cardinal sin of storytelling: don't add something into your story unless it needs to be there. Covering the story with a lot of vagaries and noise may impress some, but won't stand up to careful reading.

[Anonymous No.21349143]

>>21348704
How about you read it and make up your own mind, you fucking spastic.

[Anonymous No.21349166]

>>21348704
Overrated on /lit/ but underrated everywhere else

[Anonymous No.21349167]

>>21349098
Huh?