I'm trying my goddamn best. Why do people like this book so much? Am I too dumb to understand it?

Always believe, never give up.

I'm getting bogged down in all the names and the slowness of everything. I feel like there's nothing going on and I have to constantly reread to figure out what just happened. I can't begin exploring any themes because I'm struggling with just the superficialities.

No offense, but you really do sound like a major brainlet.

English is my second language and I didn't have any problems whatsoever with the writing, and going "it's too slow why do I have to remember a character's name" makes you sound even dumber

The events are numerous and a 'scene' rarely lasts for more than 30 pages, it's slow in terms of the seeming importance of events, but not in the actual speed at which they progress, I'm not sure what would be boring there. A single event never overstays.
And I still don't see why it would be a slow and difficult read, Severian is meeting the world parallel to you, it's not like you need to write down pointless world building. The characters are relatively few in number and well characterised, very easy to keep track of.

...

> most of this thread is two people arguing about English literature being not literature and foreign literature being not literature

How about both of you go fuck off elsewhere, both forms are literature.

Plebs gona pleb. Philistines like jane austin respected by the lame almost lowest common denominator establishment, while only a handful of people on earth have the critical background to actually understand wolfe's more esoteric work without cribbing from the better work done on him. Most people are smelly degenerate apes too stupid to understand what they read

Idk why I liked it so much. It was really comfy. There was a chapter about the main character just taking care of a three legged dog.

I felt the same way, OP.

Even though I've given up on the series, I suppose it's good to recognize that Wolfe is "emulating" speech/speech patterns that could exist in the extremely distant future. It's a major reason why a native English speaker might have trouble, whereas ESL speakers don't feel like it's much more different than other English-language novels.

Ultimately, if you don't feel like uncovering an extra layer of opacity, you should just move on. No one except /sffg/ nerds will hate you for it, and BotNS will remain the relatively unknown series that it was always meant to be.

So opacity in joyce, faulkner, pynchon is good and led to literary immortality but is bad in wolfe and justly leads to obscurity? Perhaps there should be a pleb brigade and that only reads approved subtext free works from now on.

hardly any of the parts are slow, compared to many other stories, in fact it goes extremely fast. Especially the first book, it flowed so well.

Joyce's opacity is more from references than word choice. Finnegans Wake is the only one that heavily emphasizes both, and it has only a small fanbase.

Faulkner is opaque "in the right way." Juxtaposition is what makes the text opaque, and that's something solvable by the average reader.

I've never cared for Pynchon and don't necessarily think he deserves his fame, so....

And of course, there's a difference between opacity for the sake of subtext and opacity for the sake of internal consistency.

Also, I think it's very stupid and sad to just say, "w-w-well they get away with it!!!! why can't wolfe!?!?!?" You can justify all sorts of bad art by saying someone else did it to great success in the past.

Well i agree on pynchon but if you think your average ya reader can parse "a fable" or even the sound and the fury i disagree.

He's a great artist. Your just an undiscerning ibtellectual midget

Lulz. "It's just bad art!"

Rhetorical special olympics

Just admit you and op are illiterate neanderthals.