Urth Net
_The Sorcerer's House_ reviews
A list of online reviews I've seen thus far:
- http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/121553-the-sorcerers-house-by-gene-wolfe/
- http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58638
- http://www.lawrenceperson.com/?p=941
- http://www.fantasyliterature.com/wolfegene.html#house
(This one, incidentally, agrees with us that Bax kills George at the
end. I'm coming to think that Bax's talk of cheating is supposed to
hint that he boobytrapped or disabled one of the 2 dueling pistols,
and that's how he won.)
A few things I notice in the middle of my second reading:
* Winker is bothering me ever more. I could understand the geisha stuff, but did she really have to speak so stereotypically? 'Ah so! Ah so!'
* Is Bax really that honest? His reply to Millie vaunts her as his only friend, though he has to know that she's a bubble-brained blonde, and that he has at least 3 friends besides Millie (Winker, Doris, and his mother; his mother's friendliness and focus on food makes much more sense this time around - she's trying to get in mothering that she missed)
* I don't think Old Nick/Black killed a hobo or his dog; the newspapers were at least a year old, Bax says. That hobo, if it wasn't Old Nick to begin with, was long gone.
* The book does seem in general less of a puzzle-box than AEG, leading me to think that maybe there isn't any esoteric story besides that explained by the end. In tougher Wolfe books like New Sun, Wolfe wouldn't've bothered to explain what 'Skotos' means in Greek, or 'Zwart' in German.
gwern