Trios, cover, odds & ends

Alice Turner · 01 Oct 1999, 11:43 · from whorl-v0010.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" <akt at ibm.net>
Subject: (whorl) Trios, cover, odds & ends
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 11:43:24
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0044 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0044.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

There are more threes. Three people give Horn unexpected gifts at parting,
and the third gives him three gifts. Marble asks for three apples; there are
three fish waiting on the stone at Mucor's Rock. This is a deliberate device
to evoke a fairytale feeling that will be continued with the siren, the
demon, the centaurs.

I am only 2/3 done, but I couldn't keep away from the list. The cover is
wrong on several more points than the hair. At one point Horn refers to
shaving, so he shouldn't have a beard. And Babbie has many too few legs (he
should have eight).

I am fascinated with Horn's temperament--what a dour fellow! You pick it up
right from the beginning with his terrible relationship with Sinew---who
clearly loves his father though Horn can't or won't see it. I love the way
this father-son anger picks up immediately with Krait--another terrific
character, not least for his sardonic use of "Father." Horn admits, at one
point, that he has loved only three people, Nettle, Silk and his old friend
Pig. No mention of parents or children. He does have honor, he is sincerely
sorry for what he did to Seawrack (and we who read fairytales know that he
was not entirely responsible for that; she knows it too). But the real Silk
would never allow inhumi to be buried alive; he would have insisted on a
more humane death.

Does anyone think that Seawrack's Mother is an undine? The description is
not so undine-like, but it's very brief and Horn did not see her well. They
can swim between the stars, so why not?

One question I would like to get into later on is whether or not Wolfe is a
racist. I rather think he is.

Love that Yoda crack! Mantis, have you sketched Wijzer's map yet? I bet you
have!

-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