{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3855",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3855,
    "subject": "Sons and Lovers",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2003-02-18T23:50:24+00:00",
    "last": "2003-02-18T23:50:24+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0302-2949@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Nigel Price",
        "address": "nigel.aprice at virgin.net"
      },
      "date": "2003-02-18T23:50:24+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Sons and Lovers",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "Mantis wrote:\nIt would be easier (or should that be \"possible\"?)\nto approach this if I had some examples of a few\nauthors inside and outside of genre who write\nfiction about love (monolithic or otherwise).\nFictions that you find convincing."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I don't want to get into the \"can and does Wolfe write convincingly about\nromantic love debate\", because, as I've tried to explain in my other post, I\nthink the real issue is whether it would suit his thematic and artistic\npurposes to emphasise happy and contented love in his stories. I don't think\nso. There are many love stories woven into his books, and if they are\nproblematic and often unhappy, then that's because that's the kind of\nmelancholic story he likes to write.\n\nTo underline the point, I need only think of another author I greatly admire\nand enjoy but who is utterly unlike Wolfe in her output: Lois McMaster\nBujold. The romance between Miles Vorkosigan and Ekaterina Vorsoison that\nblooms in the later books of the Vorkosigan saga is wonderfully described.\nIt is often funny and sometimes deeply moving, but I find it utterly\nconvincing. Ms Bujold doesn't shy away from serious issues in the stories,\nbut she can't help being warm and life-affirming, and what she creates are\nwonderful, joyful, light comedy adventures that achieve the seeminly\nimpossible feat of being both funny and exciting while never being in the\nleast bit trivial.\n\nAs I say, the result is just so unlike anything Wolfe has ever written that\nit's hard to get one's head round the idea that both authors are from the\nsame country and allegedly writing in the same genre!\n\nWolfe is doing something very, very different and in many ways unique. His\nbooks have a distinctive flavour that comes partly from their exquisite\nprose style and partly from their characteristic mood. When he tries to\nwrite something lighter and really different, as in \"Pandora by Holly\nHollander\", some of us only see the sinister overtones, while the rest of us\ncomplain bitterly of their absence and declare that we don't like this sort\nof thing nearly as much as his other books.\n\nBut I'm rambling here!\n\nI meant to mention that, whatever his track record when it comes to writing\nabout romantic love, Wolfe is extremely good at writing about children, and\nespecially small boys, who feature in many of his stories. They are usually\ncompassionately described and end up suffering horrid fates. The torturers'\napprentices are trained to be torturers and are so limited in their\nworldview that they think this is \"normal\", Little Severian gets zapped,\nTackman Babcock lives with a mother who is a junky and ignores him much of\nthe time, the boy in \"When they appear\" ends up in the clutches of a\npaedophile, Little Tib has a fairly miserable time of it...there are\nprobably others, too, that I can't remember.\n\nThere's a strong neo-Dickensian element in all this. The torturers'\napprentices are distant cousins of Fagin's child pickpockets, and they and\nthe other Lupine boys follow in the unhappy footsteps of Paul Dombey and all\nthe other doomed Dickensian children.\n\nForgive my subjectivity, but I also get a strong impression that Wolfe puts\na lot of himself and his own boyhood into his literary children. I can't\nprove it, but that how it comes across to me. There's a settled and\nsympathetic melancholy in his depictions of young people and their plight\nwhich, to me at any rate, carries a considerable emotional charge. I may\nsimply be responding to good writing, of course, but my instincts suggest\nthat that good writing draws on something very deeply personal.\n\nAnd despite all the sorrows which he puts them through, at least in his\nstories, I can't help feeling that Wolfe is very fond of children.\n\nBut what do I know?\n\nNigel"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}