The Book of the New Sun

Somebody’s grandfather’s collection came through a while back, four battered paperbacks held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle and snapped the second I touched it, and I recognized the set immediately because a friend had warned me about it years before. Severian, an apprentice torturer exiled from his guild, wanders a far future Earth under a dying sun, and the plot, if you can call it that, is mostly a collection of scenes strung along his journey rather than a driving narrative.

That’s the thing people either love or bounce hard off of. I’ve seen readers describe it as essentially plotless and put it down around the midpoint once they stopped caring what happened to Severian specifically, and I understand the complaint even though I didn’t share it. What kept me reading was the prose itself, genuinely some of the best sentence-level writing I’ve encountered in the genre, and the sense that there was a whole coherent, hidden structure underneath the surface confusion if I paid close enough attention, references and allusions littered through that I’m sure I only caught a fraction of.

The unreliable narration is the real trick of it. Severian tells you he has perfect memory and then proceeds to tell a story that clearly can’t be trusting on its own terms, and figuring out where the gaps and contradictions are is most of the actual reading experience, which is either the best kind of puzzle or an infuriating one depending on your patience for it. I’ll admit the treatment of women throughout the series bothered me on this reread in a way it hadn’t the first time through, worth going in aware of.

Read it once for the story you think you’re getting. Read it again, later, for the story that’s actually there. I mean that as the highest compliment I can give a book.