For my next bold move,
I will discuss what I have been reading lately. Most lately I have been delving into Gene Wolfe, again; I finished his book "Castleview" today.
The thing about Gene Wolfe is that he doesn't feel obligated to explain anything to the reader. He also tends to jump-cut at precisely the moment when it will create the most confusion; this tendency was very marked in "Castleview", which is one of the things I didn't like about the book. Every time something exciting happens, BANG! You switch to another group of characters. And since there are lots of characters, and since several of them have more than one form, and some of them are occasionally impersonating others...well, you can see the difficulty. This also happened quite often in "Latro in the Mists" (to take only one example), but in that book there was a very good reason for it--presumably, when something exciting happened, Latro was unable to sit down and write about it just as it was happening. Here it's much less palatable.
Gene Wolfe also has the interesting/annoying habit of showing the prelude to an event/appearance, then switching to a point-of-view character observing the event, then recounting the event through the account (and not necessarily an honest account, and usually not a full account) of what happened.
Stylistic tics aside, no-one has an imagination quite like Mr. Wolfe's, and I'll read anything he writes--although his books are far more frustrating than is common for a writer of popular fiction. (Kierkegaard is a walk in the park in comparison.)
The thing about Gene Wolfe is that he doesn't feel obligated to explain anything to the reader. He also tends to jump-cut at precisely the moment when it will create the most confusion; this tendency was very marked in "Castleview", which is one of the things I didn't like about the book. Every time something exciting happens, BANG! You switch to another group of characters. And since there are lots of characters, and since several of them have more than one form, and some of them are occasionally impersonating others...well, you can see the difficulty. This also happened quite often in "Latro in the Mists" (to take only one example), but in that book there was a very good reason for it--presumably, when something exciting happened, Latro was unable to sit down and write about it just as it was happening. Here it's much less palatable.
Gene Wolfe also has the interesting/annoying habit of showing the prelude to an event/appearance, then switching to a point-of-view character observing the event, then recounting the event through the account (and not necessarily an honest account, and usually not a full account) of what happened.
Stylistic tics aside, no-one has an imagination quite like Mr. Wolfe's, and I'll read anything he writes--although his books are far more frustrating than is common for a writer of popular fiction. (Kierkegaard is a walk in the park in comparison.)
Posted by sealionii on
Wednesday March 15, 2006 at 5:30pm