**spoiler**

It's been a couple years since my first reading of the book, and I'd forgotten how finely crafted the split narrative was. I think it's especially effective in showing the narrators' isolation. It's sort of a neat solution to the problem of a story that requires a first-person perspective from a character that's going to be killed at the end of the book.

How can it be certain that I will die? I've never died. Lots of other people have died, yes, but to go from that claim to the claim that I will die depends on an analogy, that I am in a significant way like them. The question is, am I? I experience myself as a mind, thoughts, ideas, memories, stories. I experience you as a body in motion. Why should I think there's any significant similarity between us? Assuming my body stops as others' do, will my mind, my self stop as well?

While I like the fact that she talks about deep-seated philosophical issues (fantasy and SF are very good for that), I don't like presentations that don't invite thought, debate, or criticism. One character lecturing, everyone else agreeing, not a trace of 'it seems to me' or 'so I believe' to be found. I like to think in my own writing that ideas like these are circulated and not just dumped on the reader.

"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion...Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable--the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"

"That we shall die."

"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer.... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

"How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession. ... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope."

"It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength. We end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give."

Any "literary" work had better feature some choice phrases or beautiful passages. What would you nominate for the best language award?