haven't been this lost reading a book since I read ulysses in high school. and yeah yeah I don't know anything until I finish all the books etc, but it's deliberately written for this first reading experience. everything typical or standard in spec-fic is regoing a kind of first contact—there's all of these vague, incomplete descriptions, dropped threads, constant anticlimaxes, set ups that go opposite what they seem to imply, or no where at all. with all this deceit done very intentionally and satirically. it sort of makes me think about the double-ness of fantasy and also the implicit uselessness of its upper layer. it's also just enjoyable to get lost in. some of the grimdark gender stuff still isn't working for me but severian is such a dummy that it's funny enough and easily forgiven. the powerful distancing affect in this book means that everything that would be escapist or admirable becomes kind of strange and questionable, which is great. I'm looking forward to reading the next book!

I originally gave this second book in the four-book (or five?) series four stars, simply because it was even more confusing than the first one without answering any of the hundreds of questions both of these two first books raised. Now that I've read them all, though, I'll raise it up to five stars. The reason is that this isn't really the second novel in a series, it's the second part of a long, four-part (no, five!) novel. Don't start the "series" expecting answers until much later (some not until the fifth book, or even on a re-read of the whole thing). The long novel is built up like a Hero's Journey of sorts, where the first two books really aren't much more than building up to a crazy ending in the later books. You might think lots of things are happening, because the main character travels from place to place experiencing one crazy thing after another, but you won't understand them. And that's pretty interesting.

Again excellent - a better Dune, a much better Narnia, a peer to Ulysses. Throws you off balance right from page one - there's about 50 pages of plot missing between the first and second volumes, never really recounted. Since the Book is a chronicle written much later by Severian, this is maybe to show how old the book is when the in-universe reader finds it. One of the great things about Severian is that he's various - he has many conflicting goals, none of which is really the master quest. He swears I think four absolute oaths to different authorities. Jonas teases him about this: "You want to serve Vodalus, and to go to Thrax and begin a new life in exile, and to wipe out the stain you say you have made on the honor of your guild — though I confess I don’t understand how such a thing can be stained — and to find the woman called Dorcas, and to make peace with the woman called Agia while returning something we both know of to the women called Pelerines... I trust you realize that it is possible that one or two of them may get in the way of four or five of the others.” "What you're saying is very true," I admitted. "I'm striving to do all those things, and although you won't credit it, I am giving all my strength and as much of my attention as can be of any benefit to all of them. Yet I have to admit things aren't going as well as they might. My divided ambitions have landed me in no better place than the shade of this tree, where I am a homeless wanderer. While you, with your single-minded pursuit of one all-powerful objective . . . look where you are." As the retrospective journal of a victor (and as a work of nasty, feudal science fiction) it has the same feel as Dune, only less clumsy: we know that Severian or Paul have prevailed or will, but this somehow doesn't unstring the plot. There is a lot of plot, a lot of one-off scenes and people. It's all earned though, through symbolism or callback or prose. Hundreds of pungent sentences ("praise the Autarch, whose urine is wine to his subjects..."). Probably 5/5 on re-read.

This volume of the Book of the New Sun was a bit slow-going for me. It's a relatively short book - 250 pages - but the storyline is complex, the cast of characters is large and confusing, and the narrator is possibly unreliable even though he claims to remember everything that happens to him. This part of the story definitely amped up the surrealism, too, which didn't help as far as keeping things straight. I'm really enjoying this series so far, however, and I look forward to eventually reading parts 3 and 4. I think these two books have been on my shelf for a looooong time, and although I'm pretty sure I did read part one when I first bought them (maybe 10 years ago the first time), I know that this is my first time reading part two. One of the oddest parts of the story is that there is a rebellion going on that seems to involve the very person that rebels are supposedly going to overthrow. The autarch, supreme ruler of the realm, is revealed as an unassuming androgynous man who helps the main character on his way without revealing himself as the ruler.