Just finished this. Here's what I understood, tell me how far off I am:
Severian has multiple personality disorder and hallucinations. Some characters and events are not real.
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Pilgrim's Progress : In Space!
It's set on Earth.
I'll elaborate a bit more and and check my own trips as well(they're kind of relevant to my interpretation:
I think Severian is schizo, as I said MPD, dissociative disorder. I got to the part where he eats the Autarch's brain and becomes essentially thousands of people. There's a passage where he describes walking and feeling like an army. This reminded me of the Bible passage where a man describes himself as "Legion, for we are many." This is said to be due to demons in the Bible, but has been interpreted in modern days to be an early depiction of this kind of mental disorder. I think Severian is the same. There are a few more hints at this I found. One is the telepathic discussion he has with the mandragora, when he asks it how he can hear it he is told "You hear yourself, as ever. You cannot hear others because your mind shrieks always, like an infant crying in a basket." Another in the same chapter is Rudesind telling him "You're every boy that's ever been here, and I've heard stories put on you that belong to men that was old when I was just a boy, and I've heard about things I did myself, seventy years ago." This seems to imply Severian will repeat other people's stories as if they were his own, that he has trouble distinguishing his own life from others. I think, and this is where I'll go into heavily speculative territory, that Severian is actually just some kind of orphan with a mental disorder, living in modern day, in some kind of orphanage. I think Urth, as he describes it, is just him misinterpreting the world around him, mixing fantasies and hallucinations with reality. The reason why the story is so disjointed, with gaps, and weird language is because it is told by a narrator that has a mental disorder.
Did you miss the part where the Autarch refers to themselves as Legion?
>Another in the same chapter is Rudesind telling him "You're every boy that's ever been here, and I've heard stories put on you that belong to men that was old when I was just a boy, and I've heard about things I did myself, seventy years ago."
That's elaborated on Urth.
Severian is an unreliable narrator but not because he is crazy as he says he is but because he may not be crazy at all. That's the real twist.
Is Urth worth reading? I found BotNS interesting but also a bit of a slog at times. It didn't have quite the punch or as much of a twist I was expecting it to have. It left me a bit disappointed, it's an interesting read for sure and conjures up some very interesting imagery with its prose, but I guess the main interest would be in re-reading it and parsing through everything to figure out which of the thousands of personalities now in Severian is distorting the narrative, or to see if time travel maybe affects the story in ways I didn't pick up on upon first reading, but to be honest I don't feel any intense drive to do so. Does Urth add anything worthwhile that could maybe change my mind?
Not in my opinion. My biggest disappointment since the Foundation sequels.
Unless you are a completionist that is also planning to read Long and Short Sun.
I keep seeing Book of the New Sun/The Shadow of the Torturer pop on IQfy and elsewhere? It sounds intriguing. As a piece of literature, does it live up to its praise or is only worthwhile if you like to read Fantasy novels in particular ?
Don’t listen to the inevitable seethes. They are artless. The books were not for them. It totally does live up and exceeds, IMO. It has great literary merit and is also extremely engaging. I would also call it one of the few examples of ‘hard’ fantasy, in the sense of hard sci-fi.
Good to know. It really is starting to pique my interest. I don't have any strong interests in Fantasy as a genre but I also don't have the preconception that all serious literature is of a realist sort as some in "literary fiction" circles seem to think. I read the top review on goodreads, and it gave me a little pause, but you've convinced me to go with my gut and give it a shot.
It's not fantasy. Its sci-fi credentials are present and correct.
It has literary merit but it's main value is metaliterary.
I don't know about the praise it gets so i can't possibly comment if it lives up to it but if you go expecting some kind of mind bending piece of fiction you won't get that. It's better to go with low expectations and enjoy the small pleasures at least in your first read.
The novel is categorizable. And that category is Fantasy. You do get more appreciative of it if you have even a passing interest or previous experience with the genre.
It's a forced meme, but an amazing one
>Unless you are a completionist that is also planning to read Long and Short Sun.
You shouldn't read Long/Short Sun because you're a completionist, you should read them because they're good fricking books. For me I think Short Sun blows New Sun out of the water, it's by far my favorite thing Wolfe has ever written
It's not that events in the book aren't happening or are hallucinations but he is deliberately lying about them and purposely misleading and exaggerating. However your observation about the Biblical connection is heading in the right direction. Legion isn't subtext, it's outright stated in the novel as well as his "Cross to bear" with Terminus Est. Severian is a modern religious figure written through the scope of our current paranoid and conspiratorial reality and Gene Wolfe's own interpretations and feelings about Carl Jung's work.
>he is deliberately lying about them and purposely misleading and exaggerating
Examples? Severian is an unreliable narrator, but only because he's had a sheltered upbringing, and doesn't always understand what's going on.
The thing with Wolfe characters is that it's impossible to really tell if they're lying since the words you're reading are obstinately written by them, not Wolfe. I can't think of any times Sev obviously lies, but he obviously fudges a few details (he probably killed several people at the gate riot since he tries to handwave it away despite normally being happy to boast about his combat skills, and I imagine the Jolenta situation was a lot worse than his "she totally wanted it" line since she's crying to Dorcas and scared of him immediately afterwards) and the fact that he wrote the text with hundreds of consciousnesses influencing him casts some doubt on his "perfect memory" claims.
This technique gets even more interesting in Long/Short Sun, where the former is revealed to be based mostly off of secondhand accounts, and the true identity of the latter's author still isn't decided among Wolfe autists)
huh
There is no definite answer.
You'd have to take sides if you want to read it just to join the meme.
Based. It takes balls having such a shit take.
Thanks, I tried my hardest to come up with the worst take possible, it feels good to be validated.
The claw allows him time travel
thank god i am too moronic for botns so i dont even have to pretend i enjoyed it.