- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz (11 April 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575073764
- ISBN-13: 978-0575073760
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 12.7 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 311,167 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Alden Dennis Weer was born at the beginning of the twentieth century in a Midwestern town and this is his melancholy and sometimes amiable memoir told as he apparently lives out his last years in the same town, an embittered old man. The tales he tells of his childhood and later reveal that Weer, an ordinary and successful local businessman, has been around more than his fair share of death, and there are hints that this may not be coincidental. But, more than that, Weer, it seems, has the ability to reshape reality, to obliterate time, even to transcend death itself...
About the Author
Gene Wolfe (1930 -) Gene Wolfe was born in New York in 1930 and raised in Texas. After serving in the Korean War he graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston and worked in engineering until becoming an editor of a trade periodical, Plant Engineering, in 1972. Since retiring from this post in 1984, he has written full-time. The author of over three dozen award-wining novels and story collections, he is regarded as one of modern fantasy's most important writers. His best-known work, the four volume far-future Book of the New Sun, won the World Fantasy, BSFA, Nebula, British Fantasy and John W. Campbell memorial Awards. He has won the World Fantasy Award four times for his novels and collections and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award for his extraordinary body of work. Gene Wolfe lives in Illinois with his wife, Rosemary.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In his usual style, Gene Wolfe doesn't make anything very explicit, but gradually builds a progressive sense of wrongness until you must start reading again and re-examine everything that has gone before. This is a very intimate novel, with very few characters, and a very small range of locations (or apparent locations), all of them convincingly evoked as partially remembered by a dying man.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
18 reviews
29 of 31 people found the following review helpful
One of the Masterpieces of Modern Fiction
25 May 2000
Format:Paperback
PEACE is a beautiful, strange, intricate novel; it is also a puzzle, but the puzzle is not concerned with cleverness or authorial tricks--rather, here, the puzzle is the essential human question: "What kind of story is this?" PEACE, as it invokes Lovecraft, the Arabian Nights, Sherwood Anderson, Borges, Flann O'Brien, and other restless spirits, answers and re-asks this final question. This is Wolfe at his finest, and Wolfe at his finest is as good as it gets. PEACE is also an excellent introduction to Wolfe, for those daunted by THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. The only better introduction, in my opinion, is the equally touching and marvelous THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, which may especially be preferable for long-time readers of science-fiction.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
An Unusual Yet Satisfying Reading Experience
1 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
Gene Wolfe's "Peace" is one of the strangest, yet most satisfying books I've read in a long time. It's very hard to talk about the plot, except that it is largely a reflection of an old man on his life experiences. The book says so many things that almost overwhelm the reader, but I imagine looking back over a lifetime of experiences can be overwhelming. I recently read an interview with Wolfe in which he said that authors often reveal clues several times in their books. He only reveals a clue once. He presupposes that the reader is smart enough to stay with him on his level. The ability to do that, at least for me, was difficult, but the journey was extremely worthwhile.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
difficulty is sometimes worth the price
16 Jun 2003
Format:Paperback
Agreed with the foregoing: PEACE is indeed a "haunting and frighteningly literate retelling" of Edgar Lee Masters's SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY, situated somewhere on the literary spectrum between H.P. Lovecraft and Sherwood Anderson. What is most remarkable about PEACE, to me, is the way it defies any easy categorization, from genre (it's not exactly science fiction, but if not, what is it?) to form (ostensibly the interrelated, and frequently interrupted, deathbed ramblings of an old man, which ultimately construct their own dream-like architecture). In this sense PEACE is most similar to the novels of Jonathan Carroll, who mines similar territory.
My only caveats would be Tor's tiny, occluded typesetting (a valid regret, as noted elsewhere here) and the fact that Wolfe chooses to drop us into Weer's meditations without any gloss or preparation. The first thirty pages are indeed rough going--even for those of us who were in fact schooled on Joyce, Garcia Marquez, and Faulkner.
Like Carroll, Alan Garner, and other contemporary fabulists, Wolfe has yet to receive his due from the mainstream literary establishment. It's a pity. This novel should have at least started that ball rolling, long ago.
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