that fox thing
my memory is increasingly fucked as time goes on (I'm a
reliably unreliable narrator at this point) and too many of these names are borderline meaningless to me now. I think doing these four books on audio made it an even more brutal uphill battle of ontology because the foundational haze had a layer of "I'm merely hearing this" fog overlaid and now it's all pretty muddled. you're spot on about the whole thing being kind of "WTF are we doing here" in the midst of it, but worthwhile in retrospect. I hit a "fuck it, I don't think I can go on" point in the middle of the second book or so, but then I decided that I'd listen less obsessively/dedicatedly, and I pressed on and just sort of let it play out. that's not really something possible with a physical book (for me anyway), and I seldom do that with any written story. I could definitely see myself going through the whole series again, but I probably couldn't justify that over another wolfe series that's new-to-me.
I say all this as backstory for why I'm googling about Hethor, trying to remember details about him. and I come across this exchange (from 20 years ago!):
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0008/0650.shtml
the geek fallout from this series is just insane
check out the "multiple severians" stuff for a laff, contributed by someone who surely just watched Primer:
http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki. ... i.Severian
some quick notes about how it was to hear this book: triskele was pronounced almost exactly like "tricycle", which I found needlessly funny; same goes for "ball danders" and "dork-ass".
your observations about severian's reliability are spot on. I think wolfe just hopped on an obvious patch of under-explored territory in fiction. you've got shitloads of sci-fi/fantasy that says "hey what if things were waaay different" and then describes that outre world using the most stolid, clunky prose (herbert, asimov), and then elsewhere you've got fiction with a more standard setting but wildly creative and impenetrable stuff going on with the storytelling itself (e.g. lolita)... so wolfe is like "ah, let's make both sides wonky and see how that works out". it's an admirably audacious thing to try, so even when it's teetering and sprung a leak, I can't really get too mad. plus he's always got that leverage over me: the secret connections that might make it all make sense.
I guess I had more of a relationship with wolfe than with severian, which isn't necessarily a failure, but it's something I haven't really encountered before. I am not really a books guy, of course...
green man
jonas's corporeal composition
times a million
and I completely feel you re: sev jr - that dude's fate was completely shocking and had me transfixed
I don't remember beseiged islanders
at all
reflecting on the stuff that worked best for me, I think it was the most obvious/straightforward stuff. but the haze surrounding it had its power too. it's like movies where "nothing" happens for most of the time but then there are some amazing parts and obviously you couldn't just edit away the "nothing"...
the meta-myth detour was pretty indulgent - was wolfe trying to say "hey, here's some normal stories, just I case you were wondering if I could do that"? I actually really liked them in isolation (especially the boat-in-labyrinth (?) one - meat & potatoes). but it's like: my actual life is a pointless mess, and now for recreation I'm going to follow severian on his pointless mess of a life, and then we finally get an aside where HE gets to experience a story that actually reaffirms existence through the power of mythic order". that framework is like how I'll have erotic dreams only rarely, but a disturbingly high proportion of them center around me jerking off to porn. that's the format of dream: fantasizing and masturbating. what the fuck.