The Book of the New Sun

Brought this up for a full season, all four books stacked in one bag, which in hindsight was a pack-weight mistake, hardcovers, no way around it. Worth it though. This is not a book you read fast anywhere, let alone up here where the days already move slow, so the slowness matched.

Severian the torturer, exiled, walking, narrating in a voice that sounds sure of itself and mostly isn’t. People keep a Latin dictionary handy for this one, carnifex, fulgurator, words so out of use you’d swear Wolfe invented half of them, and there’s an entire fan reference book, Lexicon Urthus, four hundred forty pages just decoding his vocabulary. I didn’t bring that up the mountain, wish I had, spent whole afternoons circling a word instead of moving past it.

The part that got under my skin was Dorcas. She just appears, pledges herself to Severian, and the book never quite says who she is or why. Later there’s a theory going around, that Ouen might be her son, and if you follow that thread far enough Severian ends up something like his own grandfather, incestuous time-travel paradox, the worst kind. Wolfe never confirms it. Doesn’t deny it either.

I liked the guild sections best, the ritual weight of the torturer’s life laid out plain, more than the romance stuff, which felt thin next to everything else he was building. Big Severian and Little Severian, the retelling of Romulus and Remus folded into it, that stuck with me longer than most of the plot did.

Four stars. Not a book that explains itself, and after a summer with it I’ve made my peace with that.