The beating of his wings is the third book of the The left hand of God trilogy. Actually I’ve just finished reading the Italian translation of it.
I’ve not really enjoyed it. At all. But I did read it anyway to see how it ends.
However, there’s something in the structure of this 3rd book which is confusing me since the very physical beginning of the book:
- page 3 is a kind of frontispiece, with the name of author, book, translator, editor, so it is not part of the story;
- page 4 has the ISBN code, details about the drawing in the cover, copyright stuff, …, so it is neither part of the story;
- then pages 5-8,
- on the one hand, have references to the books themselves:
- the title of the book at the top of page 5,
- references to the publication of the previous two books;
- on the other hand, they seem to be part of the story, or at least they pretend to be part of the world of the story, as they also contain dates like 38 messidor 143830 d.C.
- on a third hand, I’d say, there are things which I’m not able to locate: page 6 has a reference to something which I suspect is Banner People in the real world (in the English version; in Italian is Popolo della bandiera, and I could draw this possible connection via cross-language jumps on Wikipedia);
- page 9 contains only the title of the book, so it’s not part of the story;
- page 11 contains the inscription (or dedication?) which I’d back-translate to English as To my editor, Alex Clarke, who got there first, so it’s probably not part of the story;
- page 13 contains quotes from J.B. Watson, which could be either part of the story or not;
- …
- Chapter 1 is basically a Short report on Thomas Cale, which ends with the signature of "who" wrote the report, and is followed by the last few lines of the chapter that seem to start the "true" book from where the second book finished.
Have I read something which pretends to be/contain a pseudobibion/pseudo-documentation?
Is there any good review of this trilogy? I couldn’t find one on the web.