![]() His stories and novels are rich with riddles, mysteries, and sleights of textual hand. Latro must ask himself, Wolfe said, “What is worth writing, what is going to be of value to me when I read it in the future? What will I want to know?” These are questions that Wolfe has been asking himself, in one form or another, for decades. Instead, Latro might reveal only the truth that matters. On the phone from his home in Peoria, Gene Wolfe explained to me recently that Latro’s memory loss does not make him an unreliable narrator, as many critics assume. ![]() It could be the case, however, that Latro’s wound causes him to hallucinate. It is hinted that Latro’s wound was caused by the meddling of the gods, and, like the blind seer Tiresias, whose affliction was also the result of divine vengeance, Latro is given another gift: he can see the gods, and even speak with them. Latro has to carefully choose what he is going to write down: he is limited by time, because when he sleeps he loses his memory again, and by the medium, because there is only so much papyrus. Each night, he writes the day’s events on a scroll the next morning he reads the scroll to bring himself current. Having suffered an injury during the Battle of Plataea, a Greco-Persian War skirmish, Latro has no memory of his past. Gene Wolfe’s 1986 novel “Soldier of the Mist” centers on a Roman mercenary named Latro. ![]() Why hasn’t he found a wider audience? Photograph by Matheiu Bourgois/AP Gene Wolfe is known as the Melville of science-fiction. ![]()
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