the elephant in the room

Matthew Groves · 28 Jun 2007, 01:03 · from 2007-June.txt.gz

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From: matthewalangroves at gmail.com (Matthew Groves)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:03:46 -0500
Subject: (urth) the elephant in the room
Message-ID: <39ed084f0706271803o51f57c1cl3175fc378703813f at mail.gmail.com>

The whole Soldier series is opaque to me: I enjoy the surface as I
enjoy all Wolfe's writing, but I can tell there is something
underneath that I can't quite perceive.  Wolfe subjects the reader to
something of Latro's own predicament by overlaying the events with the
"mist" of his fictional translation -- e.g., the place names and gods
are unfamiliar, and Wolfe suggests in the foreword that the
punctuation and even the words themselves can't be completely trusted.
 Grrr!  Throw a dog a bone, will ya?  I can figure out the place names
well enough, but if only the gods to whom Latro speaks would
occasionally mention in passing the name by which they might be
recognized or googled by a 21st-century reader whose public school
education included not one single lesson in the Classics, it would
make progress ever so much smoother for me.

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