(urth) Long Sun Laughs

[Son of Witz]

I finished Long Sun the other day.
An excellent book. serious page turner for me, burned through it  
really fast.
too fast, I'm sure, to catch all the hints, but the basic gist doesn't  
seem that obscure.

the basic gnostic setup is easy enough to read.  the Five Steps  
towards Briah article is very on-point, if you ask me.  It hadn't  
dawned on me until reading that article that each book is a system to  
be explored (and ultimately discarded). That of the inverted  
matriarchy of Trivigaunte was easy enough to see. I loved all the  
genre bending that this creates.

The comic relief is pretty damn funny. They're having these serious  
discussions and Oreb and the Catachrest keep popping up to color the  
talks.
Always worth a laugh, though I'm not sure I'd agree if it were a  
movie.  The catachrest's speech was often impenetrable to me, as is  
appropriate to it's name, I guess.

My biggest question throughout the whole book was the nature of  
Quetzal. I find it interesting that the heads of this church are a  
feathered serpent and an eel. I can't help but relate this to my  
feelings (which I've expressed here before, and apologize in advance  
to the faithful) that the Catholic Church has long been usurped by  
vampires of sorts.  I'm sure I'm not alone in that feeling, and I find  
it extremely provocative that a devout Catholic would set things up  
that way. more testament to Wolfe's gutsiness.  I can't help but feel  
that Quetzal was shepherding his flock to Green as food. talk about a  
blood sacrifice.  I assume it was him who got Teasel early on.

I found the narrative device of Horn a bit implausible, but I suppose  
it's more plausible than something like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's  
books within books.  Hey, Books within books is a theme of Wolfe's,  
same as Masks within Masks I guess.  That conceit is so much more  
interesting than the implausibility of a sideline party being able to  
write an insider's account, so I'll swallow it.

Hopefully Short Sun will shed some light on all this.  Horn's detached  
writing for the first long chapter is sort of maddening so far.
already a much different book than either New or Long.

~witz

On Jan 9, 2009, at 1:04 PM, John Watkins wrote:

> Yes I have, but as Son of Witz is on this thread (and now rkenneth as
> well) I didn't want to get into discussion of the next two books,
> which are also excellent.
>
> But yes, I did pick up on the Father Brown/Flambeau thing (I'm proud
> to say that I have read every Father Brown mystery), but that wasn't
> as glorious for me.  Wolfe is a metaphysical Catholic writer, so I
> expect to find Chesterton in his work, just like I expect to find
> Borges and Kafka for other reasons.
>
> The stuff that blows my mind is the pulpy stuff that sneaks up on you.
> "Lake of the Long Sun ends when Silk and Dr. Crane are interrogated
> by a super-strong android with the consciousness of a dead dictator in
> it."  "The Shadow of the Tortuter ends with Severian travelling with a
> cyborg, his resurrected grandmother, a variation on Frankenstein's
> monster with his own android physician who's sort of a Doctor
> Frankenstein/Igor character, and a scientifically created sex
> goddess."  There's a glorious one in Short Sun too that I don't want
> to spoil.
>
> On 1/9/09, Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com> wrote:
>> John Watkins wrote:
>>> I loved the ending of Lake, too--it's when I moved from liking the
>>> books to LOVING them.  Just, right in the middle of this sort of
>>> religious mystery story, a full on BOND VILLAIN appears and is
>>> simultaneously scary and kind of funny and awesome.  And then I
>>> realized what others have pointed out, which is that the first  
>>> book is
>>> a crime story and the second book is a spy story and Gene is taking
>>> genres apart to show he can.
>>>
>>>
>> I liked "Nightside" too, with Silk as Father Brown and Auk as his  
>> Flambeau.
>> Have you seen the article "Five Steps Towards Briah", which  
>> continues to
>> track the genres of the next two books
>> (http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/jlaidlow/ultan/briah.htm/poti)?
>> The next two books (for me) are a political thriller and a war  
>> story. The
>> article has a slightly different take.
>>
>>
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