I finished reading Gene Wolfe’s Urth of the New Sun this evening, and you know, it really does shed a lot of new light on the four books before it. Here are a couple of things John Clute had to say about Gene Wolfe, in discussing his recent Best of short story collection:
We do not enter a story by Gene Wolfe without knocking, because the door to the inner rooms is never open. What many potential readers have wrongly assumed over the years, however, is that a door that is not open is door that is locked, that everything Wolfe writes needs a key—probably inscribed with runes—to get inside of.
…and…
What is pointed at is each word. The only way to read Gene Wolfe is to knock first, to glue your eyes to the carapace and peer into the world inside, like a blind man suddenly gifted with sight. The only way to read Gene Wolfe is to read Gene Wolfe.
Ain’t that the truth. I’m also reminded of something user timbot recently wrote at the Gene Wolfe Solar Cycle Book Club:
On an aside, do you ever find with Wolfe that you have a clear memory of the text only to go off and find the relevant passage to find that there is a clause or modifier in it that you didn’t remember, making the whole quote (the cornerstone of some argument you were constructing of course) less concrete than you had previously thought? Genius!
Wolfe really does ask a lot from his readers.