Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2)

by Gene Wolfe

All love that which they destroy.

But I wanted her to ask—indeed, I wanted her to beg; and the pleasure I would have had in abstinence would then have been at least as great (as I thought) as I would have had in possession, with the additional pleasure of knowing that on the next night she would feel the more obliged because I had spared her.

Been gross misogynist crap in here before, but this is beyond the pale. Hold your horses, ladies - this just became a rage read.

I knew then that however much I tried not to I would hurt her, that night and afterward. I knew too that I was incapable of sparing her. A moment before I would have refrained if she had asked. Now I could not; and just as I would have thrust forward though it had plunged my body on a spike, I would follow her later and try to cleave her to me.

Disgusting.

her breasts, that were like round fruits sliced in two.

No

Jolenta, whose fear made her press the side of one full breast against the thigh of the man on the merychip, whispered, “Whose perspiration is the gold of his subjects.”

Unnecessary boobage.

My nerves have never, I suppose, been fully sound, tormented as they have always been by a relentless memory.

and soon my fingers will feel the heat of her garment while the perfume of her person fills my nostrils like the perfume of lilies warmed before a fire. I lift her gown from her and embrace that ivory body, feeling her nipples pressed to my face …

Still gross. No woman would write like this.

Those long legs, so slender below the knees, so rounded to bursting above them, were inadequate to bear much weight beyond that of her own body; her jutting breasts were in constant danger of having their nipples crushed between lumber or smeared with paint.

What the fuck, dude.

It made me think of Agia, laughing in the sun as we descended the Adamnian Steps and boasting of the wide-brimmed hat she would wear next year. Agia had no feature that was not inferior to Jolenta’s; she had been hardly taller than Dorcas, with hips over-wide and breasts that would have seemed meager beside Jolenta’s overflowing plenitude; her long, brown eyes and high cheekbones were more expressive of shrewdness and determination than passion and surrender. Yet Agia had engendered a healthy rut in me. Her laughter, when it came, was often tinged with spite; but it was real laughter. She had sweated with her heat; Jolenta’s desire was no more than the desire to be desired, so that I wished, not to comfort her loneliness as I had wished to comfort Valeria’s, nor to find expression for an aching love like the love I had felt for Thecla, nor to protect her as I wished to protect Dorcas; but to shame and punish her, to destroy her self-possession, to fill her eyes with tears and tear her hair as one burns the hair of corpses to torment the ghosts that have fled them.

This is flat out sickening.

Eventually I came to resent Jolenta’s sleep. I abandoned the oar and knelt beside her on the cushions. There was a purity in her sleeping face, however artificial, that I had never observed when she was awake. I kissed her, and her large eyes, hardly open, seemed almost Agia’s long eyes, as her red-gold hair appeared almost brown. I loosened her clothing. She seemed half drugged, whether by some soporific in the heaped cushions or merely by the fatigue induced by our walk in the open and the burden of so great a quantity of voluptuous flesh. I freed her breasts, each nearly as large as her own head, and those wide thighs, which seemed to hold a new-hatched chick between them.

Okay this is now sexual assault, if not offscreen rape. My skin is crawling.

Dr. Talos, I think, was simultaneously enraged and delighted. I received the impression (which I hold to this day) that he had never enjoyed Jolenta, and that it was only to him, of all the men of Urth, that she would have given herself entirely willingly.

Yeah. Rape. Actual rape. Why do male writers think this is okay??

He jerks the AUTARCH erect and swiftly imprisons him in such a way that one hand is clamped about JAHI’s wrist, then returns to torture MESCHIANE. Unseen behind him, NOD is freeing himself of his chains.

Yeah, I'm not even reading this.

When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one.

She cupped her huge breasts with her hands. “But I don’t think I’m well suited to running, do you?

She was naked, though I had not seen her undress. When I put my cloak about her, her skin felt flushed—as my own was—from the heat of the blaze. Her little hands slipped under my clothes, caressing me. “So good,” she said. “So smooth.” And then (though we had coupled before), “Won’t I be too small?”, like a child.

I'm going to finish this book, but for the love of all that is holy, I am completely disgusted and will never read another Gene Wolfe book as long as I live.

Seeing her thus, her pale skin rendered more pale still by the waning moonlight, save where the glow of the embers flushed it with red, I felt such desire as I had never known—not when I had clasped Agia to me on the Adamnian Steps, not when I had first seen Jolenta on Dr. Talos’s stage, not even on the innumerable occasions when I had hastened to Thecla in her cell. Yet it was not Dorcas I desired; I had enjoyed her only a short time ago, and though I fully believed she loved me, I could not be certain she would have given herself so readily if she had not more than suspected I had entered Jolenta on the afternoon before the play, and if she had not believed Jolenta to be watching us across the fire. Nor did I desire Jolenta, who lay upon her side and snored. Instead I wanted them both, and Thecla, and the nameless meretrix who had feigned to be Thecla in the House Azure, and her friend who had taken the part of Thea, the woman I had seen on the stair in the House Absolute. And Agia, Valeria, Morwenna, and a thousand more. I recalled the witches, their madness and their wild dancing in the Old Court on nights of rain; the cool, virginal beauty of the red-robed Pelerines.

It was strange to see those long legs, so beautifully molded, with their slender ankles and ripe thighs, so useless.

Dorcas struck the older man on the ear with the gourd—a futile, woman’s blow that did nothing more than smash the gourd and cause little pain.