Digest whorl.v011.n002

Ian Smith · 30 Jul 2000, 17:24 · from whorl-v0011.mbox · original

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: "Ian Smith" <iancsmith at 4unet.co.uk>
Subject: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v011.n002
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 18:24:05 +0100
Message-ID: <whorl-v0011-0017 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0011/0017.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hi, I'm new to the list contribution-wise, although I've been listening (&
learning) for a while now.
Finally my copy of IGJ has arrived, and I've been able to read all the
recent posts, so I thought it might be worth asking a question which I don't
think anyone has got around to discussing yet.

No-one seems to have queried yet the reason for the sudeen change in Horn
between the first two volumes. At the end of OBW we leave Horn still
wallowing to some extent in self-loathing, still questioning whether he
should be writing his book.  At the start of IGJ this has disapppeared, and
throughout he confines himself to minor self-depreceatory remarks (very much
in the manner of Silk...).  As the time lapse between the end of writing the
end of OBW and the start of OGJ is purportedly very short (I think there are
hints that it is only around 2 days?) what as caused this transformation?
Could it have something to do with the mysterious encounter in the woods
before Horn meets brother and sister?

"I found him in he forest, sitting in the dark under the trees.  I could not
see him, it was too dark to see anything.  But I knelt beside him, and lay
my head upon his knee, and he comforted me."(OBW p.378)

At first I thought this was another neighbor encounter, but in IGJ Horn says
he hasn't encountered them since they moved him to a new body.  It could
also be a particularly obtuse dream sequence, I suppose.  Any ideas?

Ian

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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