Books : Epiphany of the Long Sun: Calde of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun (Book of the Long Sun, Books 3 and 4)
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780312860721
ISBN number: 0312860722
Label: Orb Books
Manufacturer: Orb Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 656
Printing Date: November 04, 2000
Publishing house: Orb Books
Sale Popularity Level: 249511
Studio: Orb Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The two novels combined in this omnibus (Caldé of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun) comprise the second half of Gene Wolfe's long novel, The Book of the Long Sun.
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Rated by buyers 
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Gene Wolfe takes patience. His writing and by extension his stories, are subtle things, rarely spelling out what the reader needs to know but dancing around it instead, sketching the outlines of what he's trying to reveal and leaving it to the reader to fill in the blanks. A lot of writers do this and then have the characters explain it all at the right moments, so that the reader can feel accomplished by having put together the scenario before they were "supposed" to. Wolfe hardly does this, revelations come in asides and as seen from a distance. Often the characters don't understand what is being revealed and it's only because we have a different perspective that we don't even know what's going on. But we're not in the story.
SF has had a long history of being far more literary than most non-genre or even genre fans realize (it's had a willingness to experiment with form and subject matter to a sometimes fearless degree) and of those Wolfe is one of the few who can go toe to toe with the so-called literary heavyweights of the day. This omnibus here collects the second half of the Long Sun series and continues the story begun in the very first half. Patera Silk has been appointed calde apparently by popular demand, armies are in the city, and matters are barely tottering on the edge of chaos. While Wolfe doesn't do anything vastly different here, the SF elements are scaled back for a more meditative sequence of events . . . having already sketched out the contours of this world, now he's giving everyone a chance to play in the boundaries of it.
Readers looking for big climaxes or stirring bombastic speeches are probably going to be disappointed, the story is pulled along in strings of tiny revelation and it's more the accumulation of events that gives the overall tale its weight. Wolfe never wastes anything, every seemingly random story some character tells, every tossed off detail, it all fits in somewhere and lends weight to the greater narrative. Constantly shifting location and yet maintaining and even, unhurried pace, he manages to capture the scope of great things happening and people trying to keep the world and the people they care about safe.
Silk remains of his best characters, an unmoving and sometimes unwilling pillar in the center of the action, calm and worried, decisive and gambling, he's all too human and the story wouldn't have half the emotional heft it does without him. This story, more than any other, is the sum of its parts, none of the pieces stand out but all of it interlocks to form the story itself, arcing and grand, wistful and epic. It won't dazzle unless you're paying attention but if you are, it becomes worth the effort.
And in the end it isn't about the mysteries of the Whorl, those become almost incidental to the tale itself, but the people who live in it and what they have to do to survive. Even if survival means stepping out entirely.
Rated by buyers 
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I loved the Book of the New Sun, and some of Wolfe's other works, so I tucked into this huge opus with glee. Over 1200 pages later and how do I feel - pretty darn irritated and quite keen to reclaim the many hours of my life that I seem to have wasted reading it. What is it all about - I don't know. Does anyone know? Not judging by the other reviews here. Wolfe has a skillful way of sucking you in with the promise of great revelations in the end - but in this series of books there are no revelations, no explanations. The main characters end up leaving the ship (The Whorl) - wow didn't see that coming, did you? Only 700-800 pages ago. No doubt erudite devotees of the author will come up with some profound deeper meaning locked away within it's pages - but what about the reader who wants to actually enjoy what he reads and feel rewarded at the end? I like the review lower down on this page by the guy who has read the entire series 6 times already - but still hasn't quite worked out how to describe what it's about. Says it all really.
Rated by buyers -
I don't have enough superlatives in my vocabulary to praise this work. Once again, our irritating narrator is given to leaving out the important stuff and assuming you know what is obvious to him; much of these books tell bits and pieces of a story while huge, catastrophic events take place just out of view- sort of like real-life. I found that sometimes the parts that seemed very meaningful on the very first read turn out to be just the 'bits', and the parts that seem most obnoxiously tedious are the most 'important' later. Pieces come together from previous books, and the settings' larger context seems to peek out of the fog on occasion; the end (as usual) leaves you hanging somewhere you don't really understand.
Rated by buyers 
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and you will be disappointed. A civil war begins, main hero steps up as leader of rebellion, a third side appears in civil war, and lot of stuff gets complicated and little solved, and mood is not even close to adventurous/mystery mood of book one.
I couldn't say that this series, 'Long Sun' really ends here, it seems that Short Sun is sequel, but I didn't read it yet.
When Wolfe has idea and inspiration, he is best. When not, he is worst.
Rated by buyers 
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After a very first reading, I need some time to forget some of the major plot elements so that I can re-read this story later. It is quite fascinating, especially so if you view the society as an anthropologist would.
A lot of the confusion from this book stems from the fact that not one word written in it is trustworthy and it should be read with much more scrutiny then I put into it. As we cannot trust the writers of the biblical gospels to be impartial, we certainly cannot trust a young man with a revisionist take on history and a bad case of idolizing a man at the center of a cult of personality. The joy of reading Gene Wolfe comes from scratching hints, shades of meaning and the truth of events from a storyteller who does not want you to know the whole truth, and is probably outright lying (New Sun) or has absolutely no connection to reality (The Wizard)/is incapable of discerning truth from idealization and revision (New Sun, The Knight)/reality from fantasy (There are Doors)/objectivity from subjectivity (Long Sun) or is incapable of having factual knowledge whatsoever (Latro).
I'm really expecting this book to wow me the second time through, especially after analyzing Knight/Wizard and The Book of the New Sun a couple more times, allowing me to realize that the narrator is your worst enemy in trying to understand and enjoy a Gene Wolfe novel.
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