Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
David Duffy · 23 May 2011, 07:24
· from 2011-May.txt.gz
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From: davidD at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy) Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 17:24:38 +1000 (EST) Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness? In-Reply-To: <BANLkTinRLkaUs099APsHvDrTHUx9Vw7GnQ at mail.gmail.com> References: <B542EE90-126D-4106-9484-A3287823FC32 at gmail.com><594643.67958.qm at web161819.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <BANLkTinRLkaUs099APsHvDrTHUx9Vw7GnQ at mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.1105231654310.6250 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au> On Sun, 22 May 2011, Jason H wrote: > These, for me, are the real "puzzles" of Wolfe, and not the logistical > identity questions. I don't have much interest in mapping out Severian's > family tree (other than hints of the grandmother and the mother). In fact, > I've always thought the identity puzzles are either obvious by the end of > the book, or, honestly, non-existent and totally unsupported by the text. > Wolfe is smart and clever, but I don't think the way he shows his cleverness > is by leaving elaborate clues at that level of misdirection. At the level of > tower-as-rocket, yes. But more elaborate and obscured than that, I've never > seen evidence for. It just doesn't strike me as the kind of thing he's > interested in (based on reading interviews and Castle of the Otter). > I can't find the interview or article where Wolfe explains a few puzzles and symbols in New Sun -- I think they were all from one page of the text. I thought it was a response to Clute or Feeley. Cheers, David Duffy.
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