I need to read this about five more times

Gene Wolfe is a master. Not sure I caught everything on the first go

The Fifth head of Cerberus contains three interconnecting novellas set on the twin worlds of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix. The setting is one of far future, where humans have started crossing the stars and inhabiting other planets. Gene Wolfe is famous for crafting his novels as puzzles and leaving the readers to come up with the solutions. Indeed, The Fifth head of Cerberus contains unreliable narrators, melding of dreams and reality, folk tales, unprovable conjectures, non-linear narration, and many other techniques to create an engrossing puzzle surrounding the aboriginal people of the world of Sainte Anne. The prose is fluid, the themes are thought-provoking, and the puzzles invite a lot of theorizing and connecting the dots.

Some spoilers now : Taken together, the first novella The Fifth head of Cerberus, and the third novella V.R.T. tell an almost coherent story with a few missing pieces, but the second novella "A Story" by John V. Marsch, while providing some answers to the missing pieces, introduces a whole raft of questions and really muddles the clarity of the overall story. It seems that the second novella is more of a morality tale, and not to be taken literally. My conjecture is that the mechanism that the shadow children are using in the second novella to shield the indigenous population from star crossers is actually shape-shifting, and when this protection is lifted at the end of the second novella, the parallel is V.R.T revealing that he is actually an abo in his notes in prison in the third novella and hence revealing the secret of the abos.

3.5 Stars.
This book, which I believe was Wolfe's first, is a series of three novellas that all take place on the same alien worlds. It's my first experience reading Wolfe, and I had to read the first two novellas twice. Why? Well, on a per-word basis, they're easy enough to understand, and the sentences are easy to get through. But there are oddities: characters who shift identities, language that seems unable to properly convey the world it tries to express, and puzzles hidden in the text. At times, the puzzles seem overly clever - discussions of dream scenes lead to 'correct' explanations that Wolfe hopes you pick up on. But these don't often get in the way of my enjoyment; I think there are well-developed characters and themes that are fleshed out well.

It's also worth mentioning style, because Wolfe is a virtuoso. It's almost difficult to believe that the first and second novella are by the same author. The book also uses quite a few techniques of modernism and postmodernism. The stories seem to explore the deep ambiguity of characters and the ways that identity can change. The planets in the book's world feature aboriginal people whose identities have mixed so thoroughly with human colonists that it's unclear whether the aboriginals were wiped out or not.

Ultimately, this was a dense, thoughtful, and morose book that I mostly enjoyed.

Update: re-read the final story, so now I've read every story twice. Mostly the same impressions as before. Wolfe's 'puzzles' still loom large for me: I wish there weren't so many; I wish understanding the book didn't rely so heavily on picking up on the solutions he wanted you to make. I do like the book slightly less because I didn't understand it all, and I think too much of its complexity detracts from book rather than adds to it. I suppose this is more a case of needing to vent at the parts of the book that I found frustrating than actually strongly disliking it.

81st book of 2024.

My friend and fellow-booklover, J, who once studied under Abdulrazak Gurnah, recommended me this book. I've owned a few Gene Wolfe novels over the years but never read him. He told me this was a good starting place. J is completely disillusioned from academia (he was once a lecturer himself) because of the elitism and narrowmindedness he found in the field. He tried for a long time to write papers and get Wolfe's name considered seriously among his peers, but to no avail. J promised me this book is complex. He even promised a near-on 'Proustian' beginning. I could not refuse.

And for 220 pages or so, it is insanely complex. The beginning is Proustian, or at least nods its head to the Frenchman, 'When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were sleepy or not', and throughout the other novellas I was reminded of countless other books, Darkness at Noon, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . The three novellas collected as The Fifth Head of Cerberus slowly unravel a chilling plot about colonialism. Did the colonisers who go to Saint Anne kill all the aliens there (the shapeshifting abos) or did, as some people believe, the abos kill the colonisers and assume their forms and identities? Even at the end, I was left with so many questions and wanted to begin the text again. The most literary science-fiction I've read in a while.

Many times on Goodreads I've been baffled by the sheer number of 5 star reviews for a book, and this is no exception. These three loosely connected stories left me unsatisfied as none of them seemed to really have a point. Likethe final story itself, this seems to be a bunch of loose notes, trying to explain an alien culture, rather than any kind of coherent story.