Oh That Hy!

Alice Turner · 02 Nov 1998, 01:33 · from whorl-v0009.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: "Alice Turner" <al at interport.net>
Subject: (whorl) Oh That Hy!
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 01:33:51
Message-ID: <whorl-v0009-0025 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0009/0025.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>  Well, she is beautiful and passionate, a combination that is pretty
>attractive.  If you want a more literary interpretaion, I figured that
>it was related to the allegory of the church as the bride of Christ
>which is also tied up with Mary Magdelene imagery ("whoring after false
>gods" sort of thing).  Silk is a redemtive figure (though not exactly
>Christic) and Hy seemed to me to be the worldly person who is loved, for
>all of their faults and failings.  Certainly Silk is on a mission to
>save her - especially at the very end of the book.

My goodness, that seems a bit much. My own opinion simply is that Hy is No
Better Than She Should Be and also Big Trouble, and that we haven't heard
the last of her--she's much too devious and useful a character to abandon
(alga crosses her cilia and hopes).

>  I'm still not sure I understand the change in Silk that takes place
>after he and Hy sleep together and he has a second illumination from
>the Outsider.  (It's also been a while since I read that part.)  Silk
>certainly seems changed to me.  But the storyline also seems to get
>murkier.

This is so (both the change and the murkiness). That's why I'm hoping very
much that Wolfe doesn't simply pitch us forward by decades, leaving our old
friends in the past. That would be sadistic.

-alga

*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