Peace, Gene Wolfe, 1975. Berkley Books (1982). No cover artist or designer credited. 246 pages.
The uncredited cover artist is obviously and well-documentedly Gahan Wilson.
Maybe a hundred pages into Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace it struck me that this book is, like, an American post-modernist classic that we would now talk about alongside novels of writers like Pynchon, Barth, Reed, Coover, Barthelme, etc., if the Publishing Industry and Academia didn’t have hangups about sci-fi and fantasy. And the novel is only sci-fi or fantasy in the sense that, like, Gravity’s Rainbow is sci-fi fantasy or Pricksongs & Descants is sci-fi fantasy or Chimera is sci-fi fantasy. Anyway.
I “finished” Peace like an hour ago and I am going to reread it this week. The final chapter made some baffling moves; I realized that I missed a lot (not unlike my reading experience with Wolfe’s baroque postmodern fantasy epic The Book of the New Sun). Wolfe has a big bag of tricks in Peace; this is a haunted house, haunted by Sheherazade and her matryoshka dolls. The novel is larded with stories that loop and decay and engender new stories, moments of strange beauty and death and life; consider the narrator Den Weer, on the second page, describing roses who, “like mothers holding up their dead infants” show “the softly rotten shoots they put forth in the last warm weather of fall.” This is a novel about extinction.
I hope I manage more thoughts after a reread. For now, an incomplete list of books that I connected to Peace, as vibe or I do not know what:
Carpenter’s Gothic, William Gaddis
Benito Cereno, Herman Melville
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Chimera, John Barth
Biblioklept 