Digest whorl.v012.n033
The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 01 Feb 2001
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1084

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.

==============================================================================

Timothy Reilly — 01 Feb 2001, 03:35

Michael Straight asked of IGJ:

> Is this Wolfe's most didactic book?  I don't mean it reads like he's
> preaching at us, but Horn seems to make far more observations and speeches
> about what is right than I can recall from any other Wolfe character, even
> Silk.

I confess that this is one of the things I disliked about IGJ - a certain
sententiousness from Horn is his disquisitions about life, family
relationships et al.  I couldn't help thinking that it was meant to be wise
counsel from Wolfe, though the effect for me was more like Polonius's advice
to Hamlet ie vacuous cliches presented as insightful.  Maybe I'm wrong in
interpreting Horn's wise words in this fashion, and I've yeat to reread IGJ
so it might not irritate in the same way in future.  But in short, I did
think it was didactic and I didn't like it.

Tim


*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------