[Obdigore]

Forgive me if there is a thread already, but I have not seen one.

Spoilers for the ending of the duo:

Spoiler

So wait. He drove the Chariot like a hero of old, but allowed the Lying Amazon woman to win, and then drove to the boat, scattering soldiers before him like chaff from a sickle, and sailed off into the sunset with Artemis on the boat with him?

Seemed slow at first, but once you get into it, like other Wolfe books, it does grip you and dosen't let you go.

Anyone have any interesting thoughts/comments on this book? Any kind of discussion?

[stone monkey]

There's a third one of these, called Soldier of Sidon in which it would appear, as I haven't bought it yet, that Latro goes over to Egypt and does some hallucinating there too...

[Obdigore]

He didnt Hallucinate anything! It was all real I say, all real!

[amphibian]

This is from a great essay on Wolfe I found a while back on a now-defunct site:

Quote

In each of these works, Wolfe is positioning a chronicler who is peculiarly qualified as an honest recorder of facts. When considering an autobiography we ask, What about the memory of events? How can they be reliable? In answer we are given the autobiography of Severian--the memoirs of a man with a perfect memory. But we learn that Severian subverts events towards his own cause… and so we decide we need an objective third party historian. Moving from the autobiography to the biographer, we are given Horn writing the rise of Caldé Silk. But we learn the biographer is too far removed… we need someone closer to the principal motion of history but earnestly devoted by Truth like the apostles writing after Christ. In answer, we are given the narrator of Short Sun. But this narrator is consumed by his own doubts and comes to us with their preconceptions and agendas… we need an honest recorder who operates as a blank slate. In answer, we are given the person of Latro: someone utterly without preconceptions. But he is too easily manipulated and the historical record too incoherent… we need someone similarly guileless but with the ability to remember like a child learning anew. We are given Able.

I think the most fascinating thing about the Soldier books is how Latro, despite having no real ability to construct anything resembling a normal life, goes with the flow and gets money, women and tantalizingly closer to regaining his memory.

The bum-rush ending of the second book is obviously a template for the similar ending of The Knight, and both leave important elements of the bigger story for future books.

I should go back and re-read the first two; I highly recommend Soldier of Sidon, which I own and have re-read several times. I thought it a better book because Wolfe departed from the rough outlines that Herodotus's history of the Persian War and entered the secular and religious worlds of Egypt.

I read in an interview that he was thinking about taking Latro over to South America after his tours around the Mediterranean. As crazy as that sounds, I'd be interested in reading that - as long as he reads Charles Mann's 1491 beforehand.

Tangent: The narrator of Pirate Freedom ticked me off. I didn't like the book on the whole and his being a normal person made the book seem so self-interested as to be a work of staggering vanity, so if Wolfe has continued the exploration of the narrator, he's proven his point that a regular person isn't a good chronicler of real events.