I have only read the first book, Shadow of the Torturer, so please refrain from specific and/or major spoilers for the next 3 books.
I WANT to love this book. There is a lot of great stuff going on. This book seemed like such an obvious choice for me as Gene Wolfe and this series are often spoken of in the same breath as Mervyn Peake, Ursula le Guin, even Tolkien. All three authors are favorites of mine. And to top it off this book is almost always mentioned when someone is looking for "weird" scifi/fantasy recs, and I am always looking for more "weird" fiction too.
But my god I am really struggling with all the breasting boobily happening in this book.
Three out of four of the female characters I could list them off to you in order of breast size. Sure as shit couldn't rank them by height (though I could rank many of the male characters by stature).
Multiple female characters fall in love with the main character after knowing him for a very short amount of time.
Female characters just kind of inhabit this world in a nude or near-nude state with little justification for it. Women's clothes are in tatters, they walk around with breasts and/or thighs exposed.
Wolfe is revered for his prose, but then there is this excessive focus on breasts and thighs so we get gems such as one character's breasts being described as her "creamy amplitude".
The rape-y vibes REALLY don't help. At one point Severian has sex with a character and he reflects that if she had changed her mind, he wouldn't have been able to stop himself anyway (okay??? Good thing she didn't change her mind but good job telling on yourself?)
What makes it more a shame is that the female characters are also otherwise interesting, they have real intrigue to them, but just barely, and then they are still reduced to objects. And they are always achingly beautiful while the male characters get to be unique and not attractive.
I get that the main character grew up in an all-male (or almost all-male) environment but I can't help but feel like this is still too much, like it's an excuse to get away with this type of writing. To be honest, all of it together is giving harem anime vibes.
I tried to enjoy it more by telling myself it's a product of its time and maybe it's kind of just campy, which helped a bit, but the rest of the book isn't really campy. I tried justifying by reminding myself it makes sense that this particular character might be obsessed with breasts and thighs. I try to justify it by telling myself that maybe Wolfe is purposefully writing a character who isn't particularly likable (I am still unsure if that was Wolfe's intent or not). I also wondered if maybe this character is an unreliable narrator and this is truly part of his character (the "unreliable narrator who talks up his success with the ladies" would make so much sense to me and I'd find that so much more tolerable, but I'm really unsure if that was Wolfe's intention). I try to be okay with it because Ursula Le Guin herself has a blurb on the back of my copy of the book where she absolutely praises this series. If Le Guin can be okay with this shit why can't I?
It's just so distracting because it happens FREQUENTLY, so it feels like a huge blemish on an otherwise very interesting start to a series. If you removed most (not even ALL) of this, I'd be happy and could just kind of accept the male gaze-y stuff that is there. But it just kept happening and I was basically ready to drop the series because of it.
However, I very much liked everything else about it and I also felt like the ending of this book revealed some really interesting world building, and it left off on an intriguing cliffhanger. The world building itself is quite interesting and aside from the incessant male gaze-y aspects I'd like to continue.
TLDR;
My question I guess is, while avoiding specific spoilers, does this pattern continue in the next 3 books? Does the main character grow in any meaningful way in relation to how he views women? Or does the series continue to feel like it's bordering on harem anime vibes, and I just need to figure out if my reasons for continuing outweigh my reasons for dropping it?