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5.0étoiles sur 5
Wolfe is the best author alive, Fév 6 2002
When I originally read this book, I had trouble making it through the first of the three novellas. I wasn't prepared for Wolfe's many layers, and thus missed a great deal of symbolism and hidden meaning.When I came back to this book and read the final two novellas, something clicked and I realized how beautiful and subtle a writer Wolfe is, filled with ideas. The stories are interpretable many ways, and thus with each reading of them I find myself thinking more and more, and enjoying the book more and more. For anyone who is interested in the deeper meanings of Wolfe's works, I would suggest searching the Internet Public Library for criticism on him, specifically the Post-Colonial thought found throughout the novellas in Fifth Head of Cerberus. Get this and all of Gene Wolfe's works.
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4.0étoiles sur 5
Now this is more like it!, Nov. 9 2001
I liken another of Gene Wolfe's works, The Book of the New Sun, to the myriad pieces of a mosaic that have been jumbled and have no mortar to hold them together. There are pretty bits and pieces but no overall impression that emerges from it. The stories in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, however, are more like three paintings -- a triptych, as it were. Each brush stroke is thoughtfully applied, revealing only as much as Wolfe wants us to see. The synergism of the three stories -- between the slight overlaps of theme, character and location -- becomes entrancing.The key to why this works is focus. Each tale has a unique story structure. Each of the three has a different voice and perspective. Symbolism and allusion are used sparingly and well, enmeshed with Wolfe's imagery to add depth to the stories. There is an attention to detail that fleshes out the stories convincingly, giving them a distinct sense of place. In the title story, Wolfe describes a melancholy world of decaying grandeur where the humans make your skin crawl and the most sympathetic character is a machine. The second tale is in some ways the strongest entry and in others the weakest. The imagery is lyrical and haunting, told in an intriguing folkloric style. I enjoyed the issues of identity and consciousness Wolfe raises, and the elliptical change in subject to convey these. But, unrelated to this theme, he peppers throughout the story awkward sentence structure and the use of vague pronouns. This seems to be intentional, as if Wolfe enjoys these little mental misdirections. It pulls me out of the experience of the story and so detracts from the work, though not greatly. In my favorite of the three, Wolfe lets us peer over the shoulder of an officer and read the private journals of one of his prisoners, presenting them to us out of chronological order so that important hints are dropped in the most careful way, culminating in a clever conundrum: is he really what we think he is or merely mad from long confinement? It's rewarding fun to fit these puzzle pieces together. All in all, Wolfe delivers enough of a payoff to be satisfying, and yet keeps the reader wanting more -- in just the correct proportions to be both entertaining and thought provoking.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
Enigmatic and Compelling, Mai 25 2000
Gene Wolfe seldom tackles genuinely "new" science-fictional ground. Clones, shapeshifters, colonized planets, genocide, "uploaded" intelligences, and the other SF tropes of this masterfully interwoven set of three novellas are often-visited ground. But only Wolfe brings the intensity of vision and nuanced, complex, evocative, winding prose of Proust, the nightmarish flagellation of the soul of Kafka, the moral clarity and sympathy of, well, Gene Wolfe to bear--not so much "talking about" these ideas as using these ideas to go deeper and to examine the nature of identity, self, guilt and knowledge. Wolfe is not guilty, however, of the sin of using his created worlds merely as metaphors for our current conditions; rather, Wolfe grounds his insights, which are universal, in the concrete conditions of a fictional reality, as only the best writers manage--to neither be idealistic nor materialist, but rather, Incarnational.
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