Ha! You read two essays but won't read the first chapter of the book? :-) The reviewer is kind of wrong. I can think of high probability answers to half the qu

Ha! You read two essays but won't read the first chapter of the book? :-) The reviewer is kind of wrong. I can think of high probability answers to half the questions that he posed and I've read the volumes just once. The observation on text stability is one that all books with unreliable narrators have, not just the Book of the New Sun, but I don't think we're about to throw out all that literature. More important I think is that the reason to have an unreliable narrator is because it is more realistic - the world around us, its people, its ideas, its history, it's all unreliable on a good day. That's part of why I like Gene Wolfe's wriing: it's multi-layered and multi-faceted, that is why I said it feels real. People with the Wolfe Gene aren't part of a mystery cult, most things I can think of in the text have answers, only perhaps you need to have read widely e.g. greek myth, dark age/enlightenment philosophy to get at all of it. If you have a bad habit of scanning text very quickly, like many readers of science fiction with their enormous multi-thousand pageturners, then you shall inevitably lose resolution on what's going on, I think that happens to quite a few readers new to Wolfe. tldr; The Book of the New Sun is not Lost the TV show.