After some very disappointing reading I was longing for good literature and turned to old good authors. Instead of starting a new attempt with a book by someone I had never heard before I decided to look for leftover literature of authors I know to be worthwhile. I ended up with this work (heretofore unknown to me) by Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home.
She has become famous for lots of her books, e.g. the ones about "Earthsee" that enthused so many of her readers and have become nearly as iconographic as Tolkien's books among fantasy enthusiasts. She also has written a lot of glorious SF literature. Just to name as an example her books from her Hainish-Universe; among those one of my all time favourites: "The Dispossessed".
One of her qualities as an author is her ability to create credible environments for her stories. She is able to write gripping plots with a convincing background of people. Like some painting where you notice after some time how much the artist has paid attention to all those figures in the background; so much that you can't decide what is more gripping: the lovers in the front or the millers and the harvest in the back. Ursula K. Le Guin was able to create societies.
And obviously she loved creating societies. "Always Coming Home" is a textbook about a people that calls itself "the Kesh". It is a kind of anthropological description of the Kesh, comprised of their cultural records. The author is documenting the Kesh's poetry, their literature, their oral tradition and their rites in excerpts that she has collected personally. It really is a textbook. The reader is guided through reports of the ritual dances that the Kesh perform during the course of their year, short examples of poetry and literature. Some reports are longer and are divided into sections throughout the book thus giving it a literary structure beyond traditional textbooks. You are looking for these reports to be continued. But there is no story plot, readers looking for traditional thrills will be disappointed.
The story is the description of the Kesh. The image of the Kesh unfolds bit by bit through the reports about their culture. Their self perception as a people. Their life in a valley. Their nine towns that comprise all of their people. Their collective traditions. Their dividing tendencies, e.g. between the inhabitants of the towns and the forest people or the inhabitants of the towns down the valley vs. those inhabitants of the towns up in the valley. Their use of language and script. The relations between their old and young, women and men. Belief systems and myths. Many myths. The world outside the Kesh territory as the Kesh see it. What are people doing for work? What are they doing for a living?
The author clearly knows and loves these anthropological reports. Her textbook way of describing the Kesh makes their stories appear very real. But of course they aren't.
Had it not been for the foreword I would not have situated the Kesh's valley in California. And it takes some reading until you notice that this book is not just fiction but science fiction. The reader has to dive into the sea of stories to find reports that hint at mental time travel back to today's California. To find hints of modern technology. Initially all those stories and poems and descriptions sound very ancient, similar to old American cultures e.g. like the Anasazi or still existing cultures like the Dine. Until you read about trains, and solar panels and electrical wiring and some kind of über-net that is available all over the world though terminals. That were the parts I had to reread several times because they appeared to be so alien inside the stories until I got them. But these parts are good and appropriate.
Because the book is not "just" a ficticious report about some ancient culture. It is not the invention of some past good times by Le Guin.
Please, don't get me wrong. Had this book been just a fiction about some ancient society it would have been a great story already.
But it is more. It is the report about a society thousands of years in our future by a today's anthropologist. Geology will have been changing California's geography thoroughly. Societies will have been evolving. In 1985 Le Guin devised some kind of internet that will exist with a structure totally different from ours but with a similar functionality as ours (and beyond!). She describes a people and a net of societies that will have been developing after our civilisation has ceased to exist. It will be thousands of years after us as the reader learns through the report about an architectural enthusiast and the über-net. But of course the Kesh and their neighbours will still have serious problems with our civilsation's leftovers.
The author writes herself into the book. She is not only the one doing the interviews and writing down the reports or copying translations of texts from the libraries. She is also the one imagining all this. Pandora. In one chapter she is discussing this fictionality with on of the Kesh's archivists. The Kesh have literature so they will have archives and archivists. And traditionally archivists are very knowledgeable. Le Guin is having an argument about archive mangement with one of those future archivists and gets scolded by him/her.
And some text later:
She seems to have been at odds with herself. Luckily she didn't listen to herself back then!
This book is great! It is thrilling and it fascinated me even though it lacks a traditional story. It shows how Le Guin was good at creating societies. It is not easy to read. You don't devour it in one go, at least I couldn't. I had to read it in small chunks, in chunks that obviously were as big as my mental processing capacity for the contents of the book. and I still haven't finished yet.
Reading it I instantly knew to what I could compare this work. It is totally on par with Borges' ficticious fictions or Lem's imaginate recensions. Equal but totally different!
#rezension #literatur #sciencefiction
She has become famous for lots of her books, e.g. the ones about "Earthsee" that enthused so many of her readers and have become nearly as iconographic as Tolkien's books among fantasy enthusiasts. She also has written a lot of glorious SF literature. Just to name as an example her books from her Hainish-Universe; among those one of my all time favourites: "The Dispossessed".
One of her qualities as an author is her ability to create credible environments for her stories. She is able to write gripping plots with a convincing background of people. Like some painting where you notice after some time how much the artist has paid attention to all those figures in the background; so much that you can't decide what is more gripping: the lovers in the front or the millers and the harvest in the back. Ursula K. Le Guin was able to create societies.
And obviously she loved creating societies. "Always Coming Home" is a textbook about a people that calls itself "the Kesh". It is a kind of anthropological description of the Kesh, comprised of their cultural records. The author is documenting the Kesh's poetry, their literature, their oral tradition and their rites in excerpts that she has collected personally. It really is a textbook. The reader is guided through reports of the ritual dances that the Kesh perform during the course of their year, short examples of poetry and literature. Some reports are longer and are divided into sections throughout the book thus giving it a literary structure beyond traditional textbooks. You are looking for these reports to be continued. But there is no story plot, readers looking for traditional thrills will be disappointed.
The story is the description of the Kesh. The image of the Kesh unfolds bit by bit through the reports about their culture. Their self perception as a people. Their life in a valley. Their nine towns that comprise all of their people. Their collective traditions. Their dividing tendencies, e.g. between the inhabitants of the towns and the forest people or the inhabitants of the towns down the valley vs. those inhabitants of the towns up in the valley. Their use of language and script. The relations between their old and young, women and men. Belief systems and myths. Many myths. The world outside the Kesh territory as the Kesh see it. What are people doing for work? What are they doing for a living?
The author clearly knows and loves these anthropological reports. Her textbook way of describing the Kesh makes their stories appear very real. But of course they aren't.
Had it not been for the foreword I would not have situated the Kesh's valley in California. And it takes some reading until you notice that this book is not just fiction but science fiction. The reader has to dive into the sea of stories to find reports that hint at mental time travel back to today's California. To find hints of modern technology. Initially all those stories and poems and descriptions sound very ancient, similar to old American cultures e.g. like the Anasazi or still existing cultures like the Dine. Until you read about trains, and solar panels and electrical wiring and some kind of über-net that is available all over the world though terminals. That were the parts I had to reread several times because they appeared to be so alien inside the stories until I got them. But these parts are good and appropriate.
Because the book is not "just" a ficticious report about some ancient culture. It is not the invention of some past good times by Le Guin.
Please, don't get me wrong. Had this book been just a fiction about some ancient society it would have been a great story already.
But it is more. It is the report about a society thousands of years in our future by a today's anthropologist. Geology will have been changing California's geography thoroughly. Societies will have been evolving. In 1985 Le Guin devised some kind of internet that will exist with a structure totally different from ours but with a similar functionality as ours (and beyond!). She describes a people and a net of societies that will have been developing after our civilisation has ceased to exist. It will be thousands of years after us as the reader learns through the report about an architectural enthusiast and the über-net. But of course the Kesh and their neighbours will still have serious problems with our civilsation's leftovers.
The author writes herself into the book. She is not only the one doing the interviews and writing down the reports or copying translations of texts from the libraries. She is also the one imagining all this. Pandora. In one chapter she is discussing this fictionality with on of the Kesh's archivists. The Kesh have literature so they will have archives and archivists. And traditionally archivists are very knowledgeable. Le Guin is having an argument about archive mangement with one of those future archivists and gets scolded by him/her.
ARC: "Keeping grows; giving flows.” Giving involves a good deal of discrimination; as a business it requires a more disciplined intelligence than keeping, perhaps. Disciplined people come here, Oak Lodge people, historians, learned people, scribes and reciters and writers, they’re always here, like those four, you see, going through the books, copying out what they want, annotating. Books no one reads go; books people read go after a while. But they all go. Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.
PAN: This is the kind of conversation they always have in utopia. I set you up and then you give interesting, eloquent, and almost entirely convincing replies. Surely we can do better than that!
Arc: Who controls the storage and the retrieval? To what extent is the material there for anyone who wants and needs it, and to what extent is it “there” only for those who have the information that it is there, the education to obtain that information, and the power to get that education? How many people in your society are literate? How many are computer-competent? How many of them have the competence to use libraries and electronic information storage systems? How much real information is available to ordinary, non-government, nonmilitary, nonspecialist, nonrich people? What does “classified” mean? What do shredders shred? What does money buy? In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?"
And some text later:
ARC: But I have no answers and this isn’t utopia, aunt!
PAN: The hell it ain’t.
ARC: This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West.
She seems to have been at odds with herself. Luckily she didn't listen to herself back then!
This book is great! It is thrilling and it fascinated me even though it lacks a traditional story. It shows how Le Guin was good at creating societies. It is not easy to read. You don't devour it in one go, at least I couldn't. I had to read it in small chunks, in chunks that obviously were as big as my mental processing capacity for the contents of the book. and I still haven't finished yet.
Reading it I instantly knew to what I could compare this work. It is totally on par with Borges' ficticious fictions or Lem's imaginate recensions. Equal but totally different!
#rezension #literatur #sciencefiction