Effinger

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 18 Apr 2020, 22:55 · from 2020-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 15:55:30 -0700
Subject: (urth) Effinger
Message-ID: <CAJ8=rtjBSvYyaQntdv06H9N6UEYSJNUsMs=QSrQP3KAPGEdmdg at mail.gmail.com>

I just read and reviewed George Alec Effinger's book _What Entropy Means to
Me_, and I think it may be of interest to y'all.

Here's my review, which will explain why.

This book by the late Mr. Effinger could have been written by the late Gene
Wolfe as a _jeu d'esprit_. It has many of the earmarks of Wolfe's best
novels...

On a distant planet, a Mother and a Father have settled down to raise a
passel of kids - I mean an utterly unreasonable number - and, along the
way, instituted a religion with themselves as deities. Father goes off and
disappears. After a while, and not long before her own death, Mother sends
Dore - the eldest son and only one who was born on Earth - to look for
either Father, or the source of the River which plays a major part in their
religion, or, ideally, both.

It's been a long time and there has been no word of Dore. A younger son,
Seyt, is tasked by the elders with writing a history of Dore's journey.

This is the story of Syet writing Dore's story. Dore sets off and meets a
wide variety of characters, including a Mysterious Companion, a Mad Doctor
and his Monster, a Treacherous Baron, and more. Dore develops as the story
progresses.

And so does Seyt. The First household is a crazed hotbed of political and
religious factions, in which the wrong words can get Seyt sent to the Pen,
along with losing his name and being assigned a number. Seyt tries, as he
writes, to please (or at least not to too-badly displease) all the factions
at once. His life as he writes is intermingled with Dore's story, each
rising and falling in a sort of pulsing double-helix of narrative.

If you know your Wolfe, you'll find a lot of this famililar. Only ... this
book was published in 1972, the same year as Wolfe's first serious book
(_The Fifth Head of Cerberus_). Thus, that Wolfe had influenced Effinger's
book is fairly unlikely, though it is quite possible that Effinger's book
influenced Wolfe's later work. Sadly, it's too late to ask him whether he'd
ever read it.

What this book has that Wolfe's major work lacks, however, is bellylaughs.
Wolfe used humor, and used it well, but it was a sly sort of humor that
usually involved suddenly getting the joke several pages (or chapters, or
even weeks) later when you realize what something back there actually
meant. Many of Wolfe's jokes only appear on rereading; Effinger's jump out
and buttonhole you.

Recommended, and for two bucks on Kindle you really can't go wrong.
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

*Maka ki ecela tehani yanke lo!*
*--*T?a???ke Witk?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20200418/68faf931/attachment.html>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net