The Shadow of the Torturer

'Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it? [...] I was saying that the Chatelaine Thecla is not the Chatelaine Thecla. Not the Chatelaine Thecla of your mind, which is the only Chatelaine Thecla you care about. Neither am I. What, then, is the difference between us?'

What did I just read.

It's easy enough to follow the plot of this first entry in BOTNS from point A to point B, a linear cause and effect, except the entire time you're reading it, you feel there is an entire web of which you are following only a single thread. Somewhere on the web, a spider is moving, weaving, and the thread you follow trembles--but you cannot see the unifying image quite yet.

This makes it difficult to review the story, of which I have read only a quarter thus far, considering there are three more books; I am being generous to myself to call it a quarter, since a reread is all but necessary.

Still, there was plenty to sink my teeth into: beautiful writing, the beginning of a redemption arc (I hope), a world you're thrown into and must sink or swim to understand. I think, like Severian in chapter 2, I am sinking, but what a beautiful drowning it is. It has been a long, long time since I was so drawn to a book that all I wanted to do was read it, and when I wasn't, I was mulling over my new pet theories. This is what gave it the five star rating for me despite my discomfort with some of the sexual not-quite-subtext (I think I understand what Wolfe is saying, though I wish he could say it slightly differently). This book has clear strengths: the slow attachment to Severian, the addictive world, the commentary on meaning. BOTNS is not a postmodernist work; it is the story of a young man in a postmodernist world coming to reject those foundations.

'Flowers are better theology than folios, Severian.' Folios can twist and lie; flowers are themselves, unashamedly. They embody their telos at every moment. The problem for Severian is how to find his own, much less while inhabiting a world in which everyone is redefining myth, legend, fact before him. This is why the House of Azure is a prominent part of his adolescence, why he is drawn to the Gardens in Nessus, why Father Inire's mirrors of 'summoned' reality capture his imagination. The created myth, for a second, overpowers the truth:

so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

The "charm of words" is but a glamour:

'The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this.'

[...] 'I would tilt it as far back as I can, until at last the evil runs out altogether,' I said.

'It might be the good that would run out. But I am like you; I would bend time backward if I could.'

How is it a future society returns to a hierarchical organization reminiscent of Greeks and Romans? Putting aside the "translation" trick, how is it that the future feels so strongly like the past? This book is science fiction not masquerading as but embodying fantasy, the future become the past, humanity repeating similar mistakes. The sun is dying and yet we act as it did when the sun was young, the Ouroboros eating its own tail: an image that Wolfe repeatedly mentions in Severian's dreams and in Dorcas' eyes (and don't get me started on my theories about Dorcas!).

I speak broadly of the mythic feel and tone of the work because, on a first read, these impressions are what stand out most strongly. It is difficult, as I said, to give coherent thoughts on the plot; I feel I barely understood what happened, even as I followed the cause-and-effect chain that led Severian, as he puts it, "from gate to gate." But the title of the series, 'The Solar Sun Cycle,' is accurate. This is a cycle of humanity, the wyrm eating its own tail.

And yet I feel it is important the main character carries a sword titled 'The End.'

Perhaps the circle will be unbroken?

Not terribly difficult to read, but kind of wandering. I'm more a fan of plot-driven literature. This book seems to be just a rambling tale. The characters and events are kind of interesting.

Dec 2019 - not interested or invested

Un libro que de primeras parece tener buena pinta, pero que al final me ha costado horrores terminar.

Espero que haya sido por falta de nivel al leer inglés o algo, pero la historia me parecía inconexa, una acumulación de situaciones sin sentido ni nexo definido, con personajes que no llegué a conocer en ningún momento y de los que por tanto no he podido preocuparme mientras los leía. Historias secundarias que pasaban por ahí, huecos en la narración del tamaño de capítulos enteros y demás obstáculos a la hora de entender lo que pasaba.

En resumen, si no eres nativo, no te acerques, aunque lo mismo, si el traductor es capaz, de aquí puede salir algo bueno.