![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Some years ago, or maybe like... decades... I asked my Dad for an fsf book recommendation from among his favorites. He recommended Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist, which won the 1987 Locus Award for best fantasy novel and was nominated for the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. It is now considered a genre classic, and Wolfe, though never a bestseller, is something of a writer's writer and a critics' favorite, called the genre's greatest living writer several times (all before his death in 2019, aged 88).
This book, with its unreliable first-person narration from an amnesiac soldier wandering through Classical Greece in the 5th century BC, was a little opaque to me at that time, and the lack of immediately visible female characters or magic put me off (clearly visible in, like, the first half a chapter I mean - this book has plenty of really good female characters, both mortal and divine). I've seen many more recommendations over the years, most recently from Neil Gaiman, and I finally read it this week and it was a fantastic read. 5/5.
I really wanted an annotated edition, because my childhood interest in Classical mythology wasn't enough to identify the people and places in the text, written by a non-native speaker of Greek who freqently calls places by a literal translation or misunderstanding of their ancient names, to say nothing of the epithets everywhere. The gods are ever-present in this book - they're real, and the narrator meets and sees many of them - but I think there are maybe under 5, or definitely under 10, actual names of them on the page (and two of them are "Kore"). Obviously referring to gods by epithets is normal, but it's not as easy to read as I might have thought. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and a translation dictionary together did not answer all my questions. It took me like halfway through the book to realize that the "Rope Makers" were Spartans, and it was just because they referenced Leonidas by name. As a child I let this kind of unanswered question just sit, but I've definitely gotten out of practice at that these days. I think this writing would have been too sophisticated for me as a child, though.
Death, animal death, violence, noncon off the page (not to the narrator), child harm, animal sacrifice and death and gore. Nothing is really explicit, I think.
This book, with its unreliable first-person narration from an amnesiac soldier wandering through Classical Greece in the 5th century BC, was a little opaque to me at that time, and the lack of immediately visible female characters or magic put me off (clearly visible in, like, the first half a chapter I mean - this book has plenty of really good female characters, both mortal and divine). I've seen many more recommendations over the years, most recently from Neil Gaiman, and I finally read it this week and it was a fantastic read. 5/5.
I really wanted an annotated edition, because my childhood interest in Classical mythology wasn't enough to identify the people and places in the text, written by a non-native speaker of Greek who freqently calls places by a literal translation or misunderstanding of their ancient names, to say nothing of the epithets everywhere. The gods are ever-present in this book - they're real, and the narrator meets and sees many of them - but I think there are maybe under 5, or definitely under 10, actual names of them on the page (and two of them are "Kore"). Obviously referring to gods by epithets is normal, but it's not as easy to read as I might have thought. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and a translation dictionary together did not answer all my questions. It took me like halfway through the book to realize that the "Rope Makers" were Spartans, and it was just because they referenced Leonidas by name. As a child I let this kind of unanswered question just sit, but I've definitely gotten out of practice at that these days. I think this writing would have been too sophisticated for me as a child, though.
Death, animal death, violence, noncon off the page (not to the narrator), child harm, animal sacrifice and death and gore. Nothing is really explicit, I think.
