(urth) Long Sun Laughs

[David Stockhoff]

Witz:

I read LS/SS but once, so long ago. Who is the eel to which you refer?

Quetzal is an obvious reference, so I assume you are simply translating a name.

Funny, I don't remember the catachrest. Catachresis is a figure of speech: a word used against its meaning, which can mean a metaphor, an oxymoron, or something resembling a failed metaphor or failed speech. "The king is pregnant!"

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Message: 3
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:16:31 -0800
From: Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) Long Sun Laughs
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <BF0AA026-6968-45CC-BEFE-CF06B8DB68F3 at butcherbaker.org>
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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



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