The Shadow of the Torturer & The Claw of the Conciliator The Book of the New Sun
Paperback, 415 pages
English language
Published Jan. 5, 1994 by Orb Books.
Shadow and Claw is an omnibus of the first two books of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. It chronicles the life and adventures of journeyman torturer Severian.
I sort of enjoyed it.. but it was hard to get through. A lot of long-winded prose that may or may not be relevant to the story, it was frustrating at times. Not sure I'll continue with the series.
Torture, place-holder characters, odd under-explained male-female relationships, and unexplained key plot points eventually wore me down. I thought I had read 69% of this, but apparently it is two separate books published together, so I don't know.
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The author sprinkles the story of his created world with interesting archaic words or neologisms. Many of these are religious or medieval in origin, but, as is common in fantasy and science fiction, their meaning in the created world is not entirely clear. We infer their meaning from the word's actual former meaning here on Urth Earth. Mr. Wolfe has a knack for this.
Finally gave up, it's just not getting better.
Un libro que de primeras parece tener buena pinta, pero que al final me ha costado horrores terminar.
Espero que haya sido por falta de nivel al leer inglés o algo, pero la historia me parecía inconexa, una acumulación de situaciones sin sentido ni nexo definido, con personajes que no llegué a conocer en ningún momento y de los que por tanto no he podido preocuparme mientras los leía. Historias secundarias que pasaban por ahí, huecos en la narración del tamaño de capítulos enteros y demás obstáculos a la hora de entender lo que pasaba.
En resumen, si no eres nativo, no te acerques, aunque lo mismo, si el traductor es capaz, de aquí puede salir algo bueno.
Very dense, but ultimately rewarding. Not very much happens plot wise, but Severian is a dominating narrator. It's textbook unreliable narrator, but to read back anything through his lens complicates what is already a complicated story involving time travel and aliens.
Although it's often hard to figure out what's going on, I felt that the text invites deeper reading in a positive way. I often found myself revisiting a scene later to consider why and to what end Wolfe chose to show scenes. The play of Dr. Talos is particularly rich, as are Severian's conversations with Jonas.
3.5/5
not sure if i should give this 4 stars
