The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun #1), by Gene Wolfe

  Gene Wolfe is one of those classic writers that you often find mentioned in the same phrase as Asimov, Moorcock, Le Guin and others like that, however much less often do you find a reader and proponent of his books. His writing is definitely brilliant, but after two books of this cycle I still don't know what he wants to say other than describe the weird world in which the action happens.

  The protagonist of The Shadow of the Torturer is Severian, a torturer. It's exactly how it sounds. He is very conscientious, he is part of the Guild of Torturers and he is proud to provide a service to make his guild proud. Happy to serve, not to inflict pain, but having nothing against it either. He makes friends, enemies, loses some, doesn't seem to mind it much, meets them again. There is a pervasive dream-like quality of the entire book, which pisses me off to no end.

  The world this happens in is somewhere in the vast future, where the Sun is slowly dying and the technological past has been forgotten in favor of a Middle Ages kind of organization. Technology still exists, but how it works and who controls it is completely incomprehensible and indistinguishable from magic, although none of the people see it as particularly divine, just something that is.

  Now the guy walks the land to reach another city, thus revealing this world to us. He says that his memory is infallible and that's how he is able to recount the story and all of its details, but he is also an unreliable narrator. This kind of contradiction is common in the story. The book itself is presented as some kind of manuscript from the future that Gene Wolfe merely translated to the best of this 20th century abilities. The writing is rich, dense, filled with archaic and/or imagined words and has a lyrical quality, as if you're supposed to recite it rather than just read it. Nothing is ever explained and there doesn't seem to be any overarching point to the telling of this story. It just meanders from weird situation to another, always feeling as though it's very smart and transmitting a lot through symbolism, but I never figured out what the symbols were and what they were transmitting.

  It's a very strange feeling, in which I kind of appreciate the book, but I don't understand it to a level I could call "reading". Instead I just go through the motions with Severian and hope to make sense of things, as apparently he does.

  There is a character called Dr. Talos, a travelling play writer and performer who, after a weird and opaque play that even the actors (including Severian) did not understand, split the money between the people involved, all but himself, apparently happy to just write his scripts and have them enacted on stage, regardless if anyone likes or even understands them. I feel that he is a stand in for Wolfe. The book itself feels like a play most of the time, as well.

  Bottom line: amazing writing, have no idea what it means, even if I have a pretty good grasp of the English language. I feel like this is what it would feel to read Joyce's Ulysses. They all say you have to imerse yourself into the reading and the language and multiple rereads enhance the experience. I have no intention of reading it any time soon, so that says something about how I feel about this book.