Epiphany of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe, 0312860722, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

So disappointing

I am great fan of the Book of the New Sun and in fact have read that whole series twice. It has great sense of mystery throughout but delivers a fitting resolution for the reader in the end.

By contrast one is left at the end of this series of novels genuinely wondering what the hell is has all been about. It's the most bizarrely written work I've ever read with a rambling obscure narrative that explains nothing and totally fails to engage the reader. Most of the book is driven by dialogue between the characters rather than by 3rd person description and so we are left totally relying on what they say to each other to understand what is happening - unfortunately none of the characters have a clue what's going on and so neither do we.

The end result is a hugely unsatisfying experience - I waded through over 1200 pages and really feel like I wasted my time. Ultimately it just comes across as a huge sprawling incomprehensible mess - a major disppointment from an author who has written some wonderful stuff in the past.

Great but hard work

Typical Gene Wolfe book - very good but you'll have to work at it. The structure of the book does not lend itself to easy reading and is hard going. If you are prepared to put the effort in, you'll find an amazing intelligent novel. Like most of GW's work what the book is about is not obvious and many questions will be left unanswered.

The book is not perfect by any means, there are a large number of character and keeping track of them can be hard (the who's who at start of the book is probably there by the publishers request, this does help somewhat); the book does jump ahead at points (you only find this out several pages later); lots of technical stuff is missed out (in reflection a good thing as the book is about people not so much about technology).

All in all a work of epic proportions, that does not take the easy way out.

Should this be your first GW book? - maybe not, "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus" might be a better place to start and the books of the New Sun are worth reading before hand to give you some grounding in this universe (but the connection between the stories is so loose that you don't have to read the books of the New Sun to understand these)

The story does continue with the books of the Short Sun...

I'm a bit disappointed by it...

... The final part is quite a bit confusing, especially when one tries to understand who's who (I'm referring to the mayteras). And I got the feeling that the ending has been somewhat rushed upon.

But maybe it is just that Gene wolfe's writing style is somewhat hard to read for non-native english readers? Anyway, I liked more the first tome (Litany of the long sun)...

The religious/AI/deity theme in this book has not been adequately explored, IMHO. Ditto for the people still remembering the short sun time. The only one person in this book just got killed after two or three pages, leaving me a bit dissatisfied.

Oh, well, these were the first books I ever read of this author. Mybe I've just been unlucky in the choice of books by him.

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