A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe
Aug. 7th, 2020 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsA Borrowed Man
3/5. A man who is a clone of a famous author with some of his memories downloaded is "borrowed" from the library that owns him and gets tangled up in a family drama of murder and money.
This was perhaps not the easiest in to Gene Wolfe's work. Though query if there is an easy in to Gene Wolfe's work? I'm kinda guessing not.
It's not just that this has depths of bleakness that only unfold and ramify the more deeply you think about it. It's that it took me a stupidly long time to get how masterful this bad writing is. This is the sort of book you can write toward the end of a long career when you really don't need to give a fuck about convincing anyone you've got chops. Because this book is, in style, deliberately obnoxious. The deal is that the narrator is forbidden to write and this injunction is backed up with some sort of neural tampering that also forces him to speak like an old-fashioned priggish professor. He gets this narrative written, he explains, through some kludgey workarounds involving typing some and speaking some, and the result is genuinely awful to read for long stretches. But brilliantly awful? Exquisitely controlled in its awful? Like you have to be a pretty damn good writer to write this badly with such precision.
Anyway, I'm less sure the sexism was worth the price of admission (or that all of it was intentional). And overall this did not bring me what you might call pleasure. More a confused and kind of horrified admiration.
3/5. A man who is a clone of a famous author with some of his memories downloaded is "borrowed" from the library that owns him and gets tangled up in a family drama of murder and money.
This was perhaps not the easiest in to Gene Wolfe's work. Though query if there is an easy in to Gene Wolfe's work? I'm kinda guessing not.
It's not just that this has depths of bleakness that only unfold and ramify the more deeply you think about it. It's that it took me a stupidly long time to get how masterful this bad writing is. This is the sort of book you can write toward the end of a long career when you really don't need to give a fuck about convincing anyone you've got chops. Because this book is, in style, deliberately obnoxious. The deal is that the narrator is forbidden to write and this injunction is backed up with some sort of neural tampering that also forces him to speak like an old-fashioned priggish professor. He gets this narrative written, he explains, through some kludgey workarounds involving typing some and speaking some, and the result is genuinely awful to read for long stretches. But brilliantly awful? Exquisitely controlled in its awful? Like you have to be a pretty damn good writer to write this badly with such precision.
Anyway, I'm less sure the sexism was worth the price of admission (or that all of it was intentional). And overall this did not bring me what you might call pleasure. More a confused and kind of horrified admiration.