He wracks his mind to pull up any hint of what all this means when he chances on the word, Amber. After looking through all the cards at his eight brothers and four sisters, he feels the strong and varying emotional responses each one evokes.
He is shocked to the core when he recognizes himself in one of the cards, and he knows instinctively that the powerful looking Eric is important to him. He realizes they are his brothers and sisters, each dressed in clothing that looks fantastical to him. When Flora goes out for a time, Corwin searches a desk in her library and finds a hidden pack of Tarot-like cards with vivid pictures of people he recognizes. And she seems convinced that Corwin must have some master plan in mind. Corwin is concealing his amnesia, so answers with vague statements that make his sister suspicious of his motives.
We get a sense immediately of the tension between them from their verbal sparring. There he learns his name is Corwin, and the woman is his sister Flora. He gets the name of the woman who committed him there after a car accident and takes a taxi to her home. The man realizes he doesn’t need the casts or sedation and has to fight his way out of the building where he’s being held more as a prisoner than patient. By now the hero with amnesia trope has been done to death, but in Nine Princes in Amber it works especially well. Zelazny introduces his protagonist, who narrates the story but doesn’t yet know his own name, lying in what appears to be a hospital bed with his legs in casts and coming round from heavy sedation. (There will be some spoilers of this well-known novel from 1970.) Nine Princes in Amber is a powerful beginning to a great fantasy adventure series, and what struck me most on this reading were Zelazny’s brilliant methods of gradually drawing readers into the multiple worlds and shifting timelines of Amber.
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