The tower of swallows witcher7/6/2023 It's also one of those tricky "get to Mordor" volumes that bedevil so many authors. He has his moments, but really this is Ciri's tale. Of note, The Tower of Swallows isn't really about the eponymous witcher, Gerald of Rivia. If often feels as if it is about to fall apart, until it finally manages to come together-with monumental effect. It is often disjointed, with stories told across several timelines and by multiple interlocutors. Even in that context, however, The Tower of Swallows is a difficult book to define, or even to recap. Either way, it exists on a different plane from most of its fellow series-both in terms of quality and the challenge it presents to the reader. If you haven't guessed already, the Witcher Cycle is a fantasy epic with literary ambitions-or perhaps it's just literary by accident. Better late than never, though, at least as far as this reader is concerned, because this darkly humorous yet also deadly serious work of fiction, with its elliptically structured narrative that draws as much from Latin American magic realism as it does from Tolkein, is truly special. That means we can only retroactively grant Sapkowski's epic the canonical status it deserves. Problem is, whereas Polish, Spanish, Russian and other readers have enjoyed these books for quite some time, English-language readers are just getting getting them now. The Witcher Cycle, as I've argued before, is a grand subversion of fantasy tropes-and written before trope subversion became a trope in and of itself.
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